Q & A 2018 01 January New Year (1pNn91Ewzbc)

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u sickness , Hi everyone, so here we are for the first Q&A for 2018. There’s 514 questions lined up, I don’t think I’m going to get to all of them. So it’s been a busy time since the last time I did a Q&A. 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 intranational scandal I would say. 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 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. 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 and next week and into the future. So it’s sort of a variation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s moral dictum which was 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 sexuality you have to think about it in the context of the rest of your life. The question is whether or not… 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? And 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 behaviour 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 behaviour from emotional behaviour or maybe you could say even worse if you try to disentangle your sexual behaviour from your emotional behaviour then I think what happens is that you end up cold and cynical. I mean if you’re let’s say if you’re 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 adolescence 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 in 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 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 hopefully that’s a decent answer. Trev Mook says, why are dragons in western culture bringers of death and destruction that must be slain while in the east their portents of good fortune to be revered? Well that’s a great question by the way. 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 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 Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns? Well that’s basically the dragon. There’s some unknowns that pop up that you can master right away and you can 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 and because anything that’s truly unknown brings it with it a tremendous amount of new possibility. That’s why dragons hoard gold or why they also hoard princesses or guard princesses Horde 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. Time out 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 what no means. You can actually start with a child that’s only 13 months old a child that can cry. Let’s say that or that can crawl. Let’s say that you have a child that’s 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 child so that it’s reasonably safe. And then the child is going to want to want to crawl around and get into everything and so 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. 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 there’s 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 and 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 if 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 reign of the house in some sense with relative 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 five percent 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 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 you can pick them up and you know by the arms. Now you 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 got to you got to have a clue that’s why you want to get the rules of discipline in 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 him 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 then 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 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 then 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 them and you put them 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 them by the arms remember no anger because he’s just two for god’s sake you know you don’t have to be angry just put them on the steps and hold them 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 going to sit there until I decide that you can leave and so you hold him and he’ll squirm and 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’s still 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 eight or seven 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 eight so maybe he’s not going to bed until 10 right now and you want to fix that so you say okay go to the grocery store or a little convenience store and buy 10 little gifts and they can be cheap kids don’t care they’re not very bright you know you can fool them so buy 10 little things that you think your kid would like and wrap them up and then put them up on a shelf where he can see them but can’t get at them then you say look kid i’m going to put you to bed at 9 30 tonight and if you don’t get out of bed then i’m going to give you one of these i’m going to give you one of these gifts in the morning so or if that 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’re if you put on your pajamas without fussing and you climb into bed then i’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 and then you can make it 8 30 and then you can make it 8 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 that and i don’t go to church you know and the reason i don’t go to church is because while 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 of it ever i’m not convinced that that’s a good thing because i do believe and i’ve had good conversations about this with jonathan pageo 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 so and then because there’s also something about going where a bunch of other people are to reaffirm your commitment to to the good that you’re also all aiming at that’s that’s got some power in it and 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 it’s certainly the case that communal church going in the 1950s say 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 and the idea of a higher purpose and a higher meaning in life and you 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 to that tradition can be revivified in a meaningful way but i think it’s 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 raj kumar 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 agenda is whatever they are except that i want the best for my client in 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 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 and i’m willing to accept whatever answer is appropriate and 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 going to 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 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 what 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 towards 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 you’s 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 it’s a balance of goods that stretches across time you 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 and the Sermon on the Mount basically suggests that you do that by orienting yourself towards God and for the psychological purposes we could 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 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 know you can also leave in your day with some pleasure to reward yourself for doing something difficult but if you if you live that way then I think that your 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 it 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 make a piece of I can’t make any advice about that or 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 and 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 a 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 that pedophilic impulse let’s say could lead you into seven different sorts of hell you and whoever you happen to tangle up in and you might want to avoid seven different you might want to avoid seven different seven different forms of hell and in order to do that given the proclivity that you describe then you’re going to 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 what manifest untrammeled sexual behavior and so it’s certainly within the capacity of human beings to regulate impulses that aren’t in their or others best interest 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 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 end point but it’s a 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 and probably willfully blind plus it’s a terrible weight you know if you 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 and then things that you 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 aspect scale one 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 and that’s because it has to be while there’s a bunch of work we still have to do on it to generate the report so that they’re going to be truly usable to people now and 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 so that’s at understand myself.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 and 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 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 too at some point in the future that’s part of our future plan but the next development plan is to well there’s two of them is to get the high school version of the self-authoring program up and running and that 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 100 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 a verbal facility say and a problem self a capacity that far exceeds yours and you’re going to have to work like mad to 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 it’s very powerfully biologically influenced and to pick a domain of 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 activity and 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 that 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 been a long-term goal and so those are all on the table and I have 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 and all of that so but maybe the couple’s version and the high school version of the the couple’s version of the personality test and the high school version of the self-authoring in this quarter and maybe 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 everybody who is 40 plus who has already faltered but but i’m presuming that you mean faltered in a manner that appears to you to be above that 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 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 to 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 aim at at least how are you going to minimize the misery if if 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 30 and over in particular 20 year olds can still kind of compare themselves to other 20 year olds because all 20 year olds in some way are the same but 40 year olds are really different from each other and so are 30 year olds for that matter so you might think okay well well here’s a here’s a meditative strategy for 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 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 like 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 ways if you look low enough one of the things carl jung said which 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 faltered 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 make a list of things that 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 got 40 years left so you’re not 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 cliche but i would say that once you’ve decided once you what you’ve done wrong and you’ve put into practice some some strategies to rectify that 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 was she in on the adoption for example was it partly her decision here’s a possibility 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 i don’t know how old she is or anything else about her and differentiate your problem it’s too vague you’ll never solve it this way because loves isn’t the right word see if you can write down 30 reasons why your wife is annoyed about your current situation and maybe you’ll have to differentiate each of those 30 into 10 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 it 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 20 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 clark you have talked about the difference between intelligence and wisdom saying intelligence isn’t a shortcut to wisdom well let’s 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’s 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 the knowledge of your own capacity for malevolence that’s wisdom the 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’s 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 that 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 the knowledge that you don’t have the right to be a judge of being without having given it your utmost that’s wisdom the knowledge that you don’t have the right to be a judge of being without having given it your utmost that’s wisdom wisdom what else 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 from psychological and analysis of the history of the 20th century hell is real enough and and you your your duty bound let’s say your honor bound your ethically bound to do the opposite of whatever produces those hellish circumstances Amy Pellegrini says why is self-sabotage such a future 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 it I can’t always match the content with the chapter title oddly enough 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 are self-sabotage such a feature okay here’s a couple of reasons the first is is that there’s a lot of responsibility with success right so if you if you say yes to things and you do a good job and and you bear a large burden then you have to carry it and 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 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 and to think ill of ourselves and you know one of the things I learned from Jung was that the injunction to 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 a person of value even if you don’t really feel that that you owe yourself that that you owe yourself the same treatment that you would give someone that you cared for and loved and 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 respect do someone who’s faulty that could conceivably learn and that’s a very difficult ethical lesson to learn it’s 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 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 and and error and and insufficiencies so i would say that’s that’s the big two there 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 that’ll add 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 name and i can’t list all the situations but i can give you some strategic advice so for example if someone is 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 an anger that you’ll regret and 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 and but i’ll remember that i’ll remember and then the third time they do it then you think and now i know three times that’s a pattern and so then you can go to them and you can say look um this happened and then maybe they deny it you say well yeah you can deny it but then this happened and maybe they deny it you can say well you can deny that but then this happened and you know three times the charm and that’s a time when you should stand up for yourself and 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 going to catch you on the way down and i’m so 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 some you know horrible tyrant as a boss or 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 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 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 Jung, Josh Gates, oh good Josh, asked me an easy question. Jung 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. Thoughts? Yeah, well I’m going to refer to my book again. I talk about this in rule seven pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient in that chapter I discussed there’s 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 but I’m going to 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 are very naive 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 and 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 or and if they don’t think they’d be Schindler maybe they think they’d be 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 an 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 like 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 anti-hero movies so much hey because they go and see the villains the mafia guys and these tough guys and the anti-heroes that populate our imagination and think oh yeah well i’d really really like to be someone like that and the thing is 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 worse monster than a monster that’s why it’s not like being a monster is good but 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 you know if you can imagine yourself as an oshwitz camp guard if you see yourself as as the 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 can tame the damn thing or at least bring it 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 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 to stop the probability that they’ll stop is extremely high and then just a tiny like 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 ah 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 as to the question as i can manage tonight i spent all day let’s see all day i got up at seven and i worked all day till five 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 outside 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 and why is it so gripping well that’s another potential reason it’s hard for me to say um let’s see i have a another chapter like that what’s it called there um um yeah again it’s ruled to treat yourself like someone you’re 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 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 is 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 else and being itself and so it’s gripping because well it does grip you you know malevolence and tragedy and vulnerability and 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 true 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 lul i don’t know what lul 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 all right fog light says i love this guy well thank you fog light i would probably love you too if i knew you let’s see who’s that santa christ says i’m a monster roar good well 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 elfred 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 you can let those fantasies what would you say manifest themselves and see what seeds of potential future development are harbored within them that’s also extremely useful ethan figel says how do you boost your confidence talking to people and get rid of the paranoia 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 no 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 they think 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 don’t 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 and if i ever do meet someone who’s trustworthy and i don’t trust them then they’re not going to 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 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 uh high neuroticism and and that’s uh 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 here 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 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 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 that’s why people like bad guys in movies so so david jackson what are your thoughts on sophia’s citizenship status that’s the robot i believe that the saudi or the saudi arabians made 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 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 they despise work and and i’m not a fan of the saudi arabians and the fact that they granted sophia 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 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 it’s 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 question ellen wilson how do i tell my half-brother 14 and 17 their father didn’t leave three years ago but that we kicked him out because he’s a pedophile who targeted my sister the older one is autistic i’m tired of lying jesus ellen that’s a rough one ellen i can’t tell you i can’t help you it’s too i’d 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 i can’t come up with a good good answer for you i’m sorry 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 school teacher how can i protect children age 5 to 11 from post-modernism which is everywhere in school god that’s a good question that’s freya hannah that was the 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 right 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 figure 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 who you know like often there’s kids out there that only have to run into one good adult and that will set them on a proper course through their life and you could be that one good adult so i would say learn everything you can about post-modernism so you’re a master of it decide what sort of teacher you want to be implement that and and you’ll you’ll be a bulwark against that kind of catastrophic foolishness and 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 consultation practice that we talked about earlier you have to pay attention to your words and see if 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 that the extensibility of your arguments by doing so you can 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 to 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 more put together and then you can take on a little bit of 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 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 do 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 so 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 generated 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 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 are someone who knew what they were talking about and then if you do that over 10 years like you’ll you’ll be solid you’ll the 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 like i 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 three 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 man or some great engineers or some great mathematicians because i don’t know where you are in the stem fields pick some pick a hero or two or three and then make those your peers right and don’t pay any 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 they their spirits still live on in their work in their books and you can pick them as peers and just ignore all that idiot political nonsense while you straighten yourself out 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 ought we read 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 a hundred easy lessons all type that um now i’ve done something technical it’s called how to teach i mean 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 a hundred easy lessons very smart very very smart book very well developed psychologically older kids i really like the harry potter books i think that rolling nailed the mythological structure um what else i’m i’m in collaboration with my daughter i’m putting together a reading list for young people for for kids and young adults so i guess i’ll have to answer it that way um i can’t bring it to mind and 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 with 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 could try five hydroxy tryptamine two you could look that up five htp it’s usually three times a hundred 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 that’s another good piece of advice and so in rule 12 i talk about that sometimes in relationship 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 be 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 christ 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 you if the person objects you can keep cutting the magnitude of what you’re asking down until you finally get a bit of a a bit of an 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 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 like 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 an offer here’s what i could offer to this 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 there’s somebody you could have a relationship with the rest for the rest of your life what do you want that person to think about you now you don’t love her mother that 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’s an amount of money i’d like to contribute here’s an amount of time i would like to spend with the child here’s an amount of time i would spend babysitting like make differentiate it make a real plan like 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 can really use help with a baby could really use help with a baby so even just being a babysitter if you were like committed to it and and made the real offer like you’d thought about it how 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 mother then what should i do well you’re gonna have to ask yourself a lot of questions and maybe talk to some people that you trust but it’s a problem worth solving because it might be you know it’s a relationship you could have the rest of your life and and if you don’t have it then there’s going to be a hole in your life you’re always going to wonder what the hell’s going on with that person so we are expecting our first evan says we are expecting our first child in may a daughter any specific any advice specific to raising daughters well congratulations first so that’s great um let’s see i’m just thinking about my daughter and specific advice i would say don’t be afraid to support her masculine and feminine sides you know and so the feminine side is you’ll find little girls now not all little girls because some are more masculine than others but let’s say you have a more feminine little girl she’s going to like to dress up she’s going to like to put on jewelry and she’s going to like to dress up and she’s going to like to like to put on jewelry it’s amazing how much of that stuff seems to be implicit or innate you know and that can be really supported but then by the same token it’s nice to wrestle with your little kids and little kids really like rough and tumble play and to and to you know encourage her to be courageous and forthright and so if you’re lucky you can you can support her in both elements of her personality and that would be a really good thing to do so don’t let her wrap you around her little finger either that’s another thing too were there any lectures or lecture series that you found helpful to you this nathan like yours have been to so many well nathan you know i would say not really um although you know when i went i went to this little college called grand prairie regional college it was way the hell up in northern alberta and um there’s only 600 people that went it was an adjunct of the university of alberta it still exists it’s a really lovely building um and we had professors there an english professor and a political science professor biology professor philosophy professor people that i still remember little seminars and they we got deeply into the material and i really it really helped me a lot this english professor really taught me to write too because he just slashed my essays to ribbons i was really upset the first time i got a bad grade because i’d always got good grades in my papers in high school even though they were dreadful um you know i was verbally intelligent enough to be able to compose an essay that was better than most with very little effort and with very little quality and so that was very influential to me and i did a lot of reading under the tutelage of those professors in these tiny little courses in my first year but mostly what’s been helpful to me have been books and you know i read niches i didn’t read all of niches but i read all that was easily easily accessible published works of niches in sequential order in the order in which they were written when i was in my 20s and i read everything that Jung had published it when i was in my 20s and um and and well and the same with a wide variety of other authors and so those were like lecture series and they were i was unbelievably useful to me i put some of those books on my reading this so um could you please tell us your second ghost story as mentioned on h3h3 podcast god nicholas if you ask me that at the next q a and people vote it up then i’ll tell the story but i can’t right now because it’s a long story and i’m just out of voice and brain and time and that’s so i’m going to answer two more questions i think and then i’m going to stop because i really am running out of um words let’s see ke says have you read much thomas soul in many ways he filled your societal role for the last generation from a different academic perspective i’m just reading his book right now um it’s what is it white black rednecks and white liberals is that right black rednecks and white liberals yeah yeah and i i’m i’m still making my mind up about it it’s quite a radical idea i mean in that book soul claims that black urban culture is actually a derivative of southern cracker culture and that that in turn is a derivative of rather dysfunctional highland dysfunctional british culture what would you call rural cult british rural culture from a couple of hundred years ago um i’m still thinking it through i find the book really interesting and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true but it’s quite original the thesis is quite original so i’m i’m working my way through that right now and and i don’t have anything much more intelligent to say than that can you share with us your reading habits max says i’m sorry i’m skipping over some questions but i have to answer some easier ones because i’m out of the capacity to answer difficult ones i’ll answer this one instead if you could talk to donald trump for a day what would you try to say or convince him about i don’t think i would try to convince him about things i don’t actually try to convince people about things i don’t think i try to ask them i’d ask him a whole bunch of questions i’d try to figure out how he thought because i’m really curious about that i’d ask him all sorts of questions ask see if i could find out what he was up to i’d like to know what he’s aiming at i’d like to know why he think he became president what he did right what he did wrong what what he dreads like what he would consider a catastrophic failure where he thinks his biggest weaknesses are what he’d like to leave as a as a legacy um that would be fascinating but see i find generally speaking it’s much more interesting to ask people questions especially people like that than ever to try to convince them of things because the thing is i already know what i know but i have no idea what he knows or what he’s like and so it’d be amazing to be able to talk to him and so i have a bit of that opportunity now in canada because i’ve been speaking to a lot of political figures in canada i’m going to have that opportunity in europe but a lot of a lot of what you want to do when you meet people is ask them questions because you know they’ll tell you all sorts of things you don’t know and that’s also an entry point to a really good conversation is to ask questions so that’s what i would do i’d ask questions like mad until he chased me away so one more daniel shell i like this question how would you give a speech to soldiers entering the army about responsibility i will command a basic training unit and address young soldiers advice daniel what i would do is you can think about this you could ask them to complete the future authoring program i think that would be a really good idea but if you don’t want to do that but you should ask them to like get them to sit down for 90 minutes or an hour even i would use the future authoring program because it’s just easier but ask them what sort of soldiers they want to be in three to five years like if they could put themselves together and be the best military and serve the the purpose that they enrolled in the military for in the best possible manner what would they look like as their own future ideal they have to think it through so and then the other thing you can ask them this is also part of the future authoring program is like what would your life look like three to five years down the road if you fail in your in your desire to to become a proper soldier what sort of hell are you courting by failing to take on the responsibility and if you can get them to think that through you know the probability that they’ll do a good job will vastly increase really vastly increase lots of young people have never thought about who it is that they could be if they started to be the person they could be and so getting them to think about that and write about it would be extremely important so what i would do first of all is get them to do the writing and the thinking and then give the speech and maybe once they’ve done it you know you could ask them if they’d be willing to share with you some of what they’ve written i wouldn’t make that mandatory because then they might not be able to write about it honestly so that’s how i would go about it so okay well i’m done so um thank you very much for tuning in and thank you all for your support and um keep what else i hope that i have lots of plans for 2018 and i would like to keep you all in the loop and so i’ll post a lot of those oh yes i should tell you this i’m going to be giving some public talks a bunch of them so i’m going to be in the following places in january february and march i’ll try to say them in order i’m going to be in london and then i’m going to be in amsterdam and then i’m going to be in new york los angeles san francisco maybe oakland then i’m going to be in a bunch of cities across canada in major cities winnipeg edmonton ottawa calgary maybe this little town grand prairie that i went to college in vancouver and then i’m going to go down to australia and i’m going to go to melbourne and sydney and brisbane and so i’ll post the dates on my website very soon i’m still making the arrangements and so if you want to come and listen to me talk then you’ll have the opportunity to do so and so okay so i have to say good night and so good night to all of you and what would i like to close with well i’m glad you’re tuning in and i hope that you’re using the information that you’re finding as a consequence of tuning in to put your lives together because it would really be good in 2018 if a whole bunch of people did everything they could to put their lives together because then maybe we could avoid this idiot catastrophe that we seem to be dreadfully sliding towards and so that would be lovely if we could just not do that so until next time bye bye so