Alain de Botton is a philosopher who likes the best of religion, but doesn’t believe in God. He says that the most boring question you can ask of any religion is whether it is true. But how to live, how to die, what is good, and what is bad — these are questions religion has sophisticated ways of addressing. So he’s created The School of Life — where people young and old explore ritual, community, beauty, and wisdom. He explains why these ideas shouldn’t be reserved just for believers.

Under President Xi Jinping, China is pioneering a new form of governance by surveillance. In the first of a two-part series, we look at how China tested that system by targeting one minority group. Guest: Paul Mozur, a technology reporter for The New York Times based in Shanghai. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Background reading:

• Chinese authorities are expanding an extensive surveillance net by using a vast, secret system of facial recognition technology to control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority.
• Technology built for China’s surveillance system is now being applied — and sometimes abused — by other governments.

How do you build a thriving online community? One human connection at a time. Caterina Fake is the host of our spinoff series "Should This Exist?” and she knows: Whatever you are when you're SMALL — gets amplified as you grow. So if you're building any kind of community (e-commerce, crowd-funding, social media), emphasize the human, and be careful what you cultivate. Caterina cofounded the pioneering photo site Flickr and helped build companies like Etsy, Kickstarter, Stack Overflow, and even Blue Bottle Coffee from their beginnings. Her wise words for every founder: You have has a responsibility to shape the community from day one -- because the tone you set is the tone you’re going to keep, even as you go viral.

Elizabeth Kolbert covers climate change for the New Yorker. She's the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction. And she recently wrote a paragraph I can't stop thinking about. "The problem with global warming—and the reason it continues to resist illustration, even as the streets flood and the forests die and the mussels rot on the shores—is that experience is an inadequate guide to what’s going on. The climate operates on a time delay. When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, it takes decades—in a technical sense, millennia—for the earth to equilibrate. This summer’s fish kill was a product of warming that had become inevitable twenty or thirty years ago, and the warming that’s being locked in today won’t be fully felt until today’s toddlers reach middle age. In effect, we are living in the climate of the past, but already we’ve determined the climate’s future."Kolbert lives, to an unusual degree, in the planet's future. She travels to the places around the world where the climate of tomorrow is visible today. She has watched glaciers melting, and seen species dying. And she is able to convey both the science and the cost with a rare lucidity. Talking with Kolbert left me with an unnerving thought. We look back on past eras in human history and judge them morally failed. We think of the Spanish Inquisition or the Mongol hordes and believe ourselves civilized, rational, moral in a way our ancestors weren't. But if the science is right, and we do unto our descendants what the data says we are doing to them, we will be judged monsters. And it will be all the worse because we knew what we were doing and we knew how to stop, but we decided it was easier to disbelieve the science or ignore the consequences. Kolbert and I talk about the consequences, but also about what would be necessary to stabilize the climate and back off the mass extinction event that is currently underway. We discuss geoengineering, political will, the environmental cost of meat, and what individuals can and can't do. We talk about Trump's cabinet, about whether technological innovation will save us, and if pricing carbon is enough. We talk about whether hope remains a realistic emotion when it comes to our environmental future.Books:-Edward Abbe’s “Desert Solitaire”-Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”-David G. Haskell’s “The Forest Unseen”-Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature”

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0:00:00 - Opening

0:21:27 - Who becomes evil?  And Why?

0:31:59 - Taking ultimate responsibility.  

0:41:43 - Dangerous but disciplined.

0:59:40 - Discipline and kids psychology.

1:05:08 - How to be successful.  Breaking the loop.

2:04:42 - Self Authoring.

2:34:36 - Determining personality traits.

2:53:35 - The rise of Jordan Peterson.

3:00:29 - Using praise and rewards carefully.  Participation trophies?

3:13:25 - Support JockoStore stuff, Super Krill Oil and Joint Warfare, Origin Brand Apparel, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book), The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual.

3:41:39 - Closing Gratitude. 

0:00:00 - Opening

0:02:50 - James Bollich, "A Soldier's Journal" 

2:07:38 - Final Thoughts and Take-aways.

2:21:30 - Support.

2:49:58 - Closing Gratitude.