The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 200. Exploring the Pareto Principle

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

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00:00:51.060 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. We're moving to one

00:00:59.020 interview per week released on Mondays and a compilation podcast surrounding interesting

00:01:04.300 topics on Thursdays. In this episode, we investigate the principle set forth by Vilfredo Purito, an

00:01:12.360 economist born in 1848, which specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes,

00:01:18.740 asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. This principle serves as a general

00:01:24.540 reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. The Purito principle is

00:01:30.300 also known as the Purito rule, the 80-20 rule, or the Matthew principle. Dad often uses the principle

00:01:36.500 to demonstrate the harsh reality that inequality is not a simple issue and therefore has no simple

00:01:41.740 answer. The final section of the podcast is taken from Dad's 2019 lecture titled,

00:01:46.940 The Deeper the Abyss, The Brighter the Light. And it makes up a long section towards the end of the

00:01:51.660 episode. Please note that even though it moves away from the direct discussion of the principle,

00:01:55.980 the remaining section of the lecture is how we can move forward now that we can see the Purito

00:02:00.660 principle at play. I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:02:03.500 The system in Russia, the Soviet Union, which was a collection of states, an empire, and the system that

00:02:29.500 Mao established in China, and the system that still exists in Korea as a remnant of the Cold War,

00:02:38.940 and systems in Southeast Asia and in Africa, were all predicated on Marxist presuppositions.

00:02:45.740 Presuppositions that were utopian in nature and that posited a utopian future where property was held in

00:02:58.860 common and everyone had enough and everyone was called upon to do what they could, right, from each

00:03:05.980 according to his ability to each according to his need, which is a lovely sentiment and you can imagine

00:03:11.900 how it would be attractive even intellectually because of course other systems, all other systems

00:03:20.620 produce vast disparities in income. It's like a natural law. It's actually governed by, you can model it

00:03:32.460 with a distribution called the Purito distribution and the Purito distribution looks like this.

00:03:36.940 It doesn't look like a normal distribution. A lot of you guys have been told about normal distributions and how

00:03:43.500 many things follow on normal distribution, most things, but that's really a limited case.

00:03:52.140 You can understand a Purito distribution if you've all played Monopoly, I presume. At the beginning,

00:03:59.820 everyone has the same amount of money, will include property, the same amount of wealth.

00:04:05.740 Then what happens as the game progresses, and really as a function of chance, I mean, I know you

00:04:10.300 have to use your head a little bit in Monopoly, but the basic rule is just buy everything you can get your hands on

00:04:17.260 and then trade meanly, something like that.

00:04:19.420 So, at the beginning everybody has the same amount, and then as you begin to play,

00:04:26.300 if you had enough players, you would develop a normal distribution because some people would win

00:04:32.140 relatively consistently and some people would lose relatively consistently, and so the money starts to

00:04:37.340 be distributed in a normal distribution, but the thing about money and the thing about lots of things is that

00:04:44.700 zero is involved, and zero is a weird place, because if you're playing a trading game, and you hit zero,

00:04:55.980 then you're done, and so, and it's very hard to recover from zero, and you know, it's really hard to recover,

00:05:02.860 you know when you're doomed in Monopoly, you know, you can tell, you've got some resources, but

00:05:08.940 there's going to be some crisis when you land on some hotel, and you're going to get wiped out, you know it, so

00:05:15.100 there's a point at which you're headed for zero, even if you have something, you know, and you might be rescued by

00:05:24.540 luck,

00:05:27.740 but you know when you're doomed.

00:05:31.180 So what happens is that as you continue to play Monopoly, more and more people stack up as zero,

00:05:38.460 and fewer and fewer people have more and more money, and when the game is over,

00:05:45.100 everyone has nothing except one person, they have all of it, now the funny thing about that is that

00:05:50.540 in some sense that's how trading games work, you know, you got, you might wonder why is there,

00:05:55.900 why there is inequality in a society, and it's easy to consider that it's because the society is corrupt,

00:06:01.260 and perhaps, you know, societies are somewhat or horribly corrupt, that's the variation, there's no

00:06:10.060 society that's without its criminal, and criminal element and fixed element,

00:06:15.580 anyways,

00:06:18.540 trading games tend to produce a Pareto distribution so that very many people have very little,

00:06:24.620 and a tiny minority have a tremendous amount, that's the one percent that you hear about, right?

00:06:29.980 And, you know, the thing about that one percent is that that's happened in every society that's ever been studied.

00:06:35.980 It doesn't really matter what the governmental system is, and it certainly handled, it certainly happened under the Soviets,

00:06:41.580 that's for sure,

00:06:42.940 and there was a lot of people who had enough zero, so they just died.

00:06:47.500 So, you know, the utopian dream was completely

00:06:54.780 unimplementable for a variety of very complex reasons.

00:06:58.780 One is that it's very hard to fight against that distribution pattern when people are trading, because

00:07:05.740 mere statistics will do that, and then there's other things that, and I should tell you as well,

00:07:10.220 that the Pareto distribution governs a lot of things, so

00:07:15.340 if you look at books, if I remember properly,

00:07:18.620 last year there was something like a million English language books published,

00:07:22.540 and I think 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies, which is none, right? That's none,

00:07:29.420 and of that 500, you can be sure that one of them was by Stephen King, and he took half the money,

00:07:35.420 because there's like five authors in the English language who are on every airport paperback stand

00:07:44.380 occupying the top rung, and that's massive real estate, right? Because it's replicated everywhere,

00:07:50.140 and because they're so prominent, and because there are known names, when people are in a hurry,

00:07:57.020 and they just want something to read, they just grab that, and then more money goes to those people,

00:08:00.620 and so, you know, success breeds success, and failure breeds failure, and it's not necessarily

00:08:06.940 linear, and that's a really difficult thing to deal with, and it's hard on societies, because

00:08:13.980 one of the things we do know is that, you know, as you stretch out the inequality,

00:08:21.100 you make men, particularly on the lower end of the distribution, more and more likely to be

00:08:26.940 aggressive, it's sort of like, you imagine every man has a threshold for violence, and status is

00:08:33.260 important to men, not that it's not important to women, but it's different, it's a different kind

00:08:38.940 of status, its status is important to men, because it's one of the things that makes them marketable as

00:08:44.380 partners to women, so it actually turns out to be quite important to men, men tend to compete

00:08:49.420 with one another for status, hierarchy position, and in a really unequal society, if you're like a low

00:08:57.260 rung guy, then, and you don't have any opportunity to rise, because the society isn't structured so that

00:09:05.660 there's mobility, then the more aggressive guys tend to turn to criminality, and you know, and so you

00:09:13.420 could say, there's a threshold for criminality, and the more inequality pressure you put on a particular

00:09:21.820 area, geographic or political area, the more inequality pressure you put on it,

00:09:26.380 the more men slip past that threshold, and into criminality, and you know, there's been pretty

00:09:33.180 good studies done of drug gang in Chicago, that was the best one, a sociologist actually went and

00:09:39.900 hung out with a drug gang for, he got into it, I guess the drug gang leader was, you know,

00:09:47.820 I wouldn't say necessarily narcissistic, but that might be a reasonable way of thinking about it,

00:09:53.260 and he was kind of happy with the idea of maybe being the subject of a book,

00:09:59.100 and, and so this guy was able to associate with them, got to know them quite well,

00:10:06.380 and then the housing project in which the gang was housed was slated for demolition, and the gang broke

00:10:12.700 up, and he got the books, because they kept books, and what he found was the average street drug dealer,

00:10:19.980 first of all, was employed in another job, as well, and was making far less than minimum wage,

00:10:27.980 now, but the guys, you know, further up the chain, of course, followed the Pareto distribution,

00:10:33.660 and so there was a tiny minority of them who were raking in a tremendous amount of loot,

00:10:37.820 and the guys at the bottom were just waiting around for the possibility that they could rise

00:10:43.580 up the hierarchy, and you know, it's a pretty violent game, so the chances that someone's going to be

00:10:51.340 taken out is pretty high, and then a little slot opens up for some opportunistic

00:10:56.540 second rater, and perhaps he can move up the hierarchy.

00:11:07.100 So, the Pareto distribution governs all sorts of other things too, I mentioned

00:11:12.860 it governs the popularity of books, the sales of books, but it also, it also

00:11:18.140 characterizes the distribution of everything that people produce, so if you think of creative

00:11:26.380 production of any sort, artistic production, industrial production, it doesn't matter.

00:11:33.580 Almost everything fails, and a few things succeed beyond anyone's wildest imagination.

00:11:41.020 You see, because the Western leftist intellectuals, although, right from 1919 forward, turned a blind

00:11:49.740 eye to what was happening in the Soviet Union, now and then they were invited there, even people,

00:11:54.460 well, people who were very well regarded in the West were often invited, but, and who were sympathetic

00:11:59.740 to the Soviet Union, were often invited there for a visit, and the Soviets would do the same thing

00:12:03.980 the North Koreans do now when they invite foreigners to visit, which is that they would set up fake

00:12:09.420 places for them to visit, called Potemkin villages, where everyone was thriving and doing well.

00:12:15.500 The Nazis did the same thing with the concentration camps to begin with, especially the ones they

00:12:19.420 established for children, and they would invite dim-witted leftist Western intellectuals to come

00:12:24.380 to the Soviet Union and see the wonderful paradise that had been set up for everyone, which was a complete

00:12:29.500 and utter facade and sham, and then they would go back to the West and report on how the utopia was

00:12:34.620 progressing precisely according to the Marxist doctrines, and we knew from the 1930s forward,

00:12:40.380 because Malcolm Muggeridge did this to begin with, who investigated what was going on in the Soviet

00:12:44.540 Union, I think for the Manchester Guardian, and he started reporting in 19, in the late 1910s and then

00:12:51.820 the early 1920s, if I remember correctly, it was approximately in that period, maybe a bit later,

00:12:57.500 he recorded what was happening when the Soviets attempted to collectivize the peasant farmers,

00:13:02.780 and so what they did was take all these people who were previously serfs, right,

00:13:07.900 only a couple of decades previously, which was not much better than being a slave,

00:13:11.580 you were basically property, and that was happening until about 1880 or thereabouts,

00:13:15.900 the serfs were emancipated, many of them ended up holding their own land, right, so the land was

00:13:20.460 distributed from the nobles to the peasantry, that was something that Tolstoy was, Leo Tolstoy was

00:13:26.220 involved in, and by the time the Soviet Revolution came around, which would be

00:13:31.340 uh, at the latter part of the 1910s, after the First World War, the peasant class had actually

00:13:37.340 established farms, of course varying productivity, some of the peasant farmers were very, very good at

00:13:44.700 being farmers, and produced a huge proportion of Russia's and the Ukraine's food, because one of the

00:13:50.940 things, we'll talk about this later as the class progress, is one of the things that you'll find

00:13:54.620 if you look at creative production in any domain, it doesn't matter, artistic domain, food production,

00:14:02.540 novels written, novels sold, money generated, number of companies generated, number of goals scored in

00:14:09.580 hockey, etc., any, or number of paintings painted, number of compositions written, anything like that,

00:14:16.140 where, where the fundamental underlying measure is human productivity, what you find is that a very

00:14:22.140 tiny percentage of people produce almost all the output, it's called a Pareto distribution, p-a-r-e-t-o,

00:14:29.340 and it was studied in detail in scientific productivity by someone named de Sola Price, it's a square root

00:14:35.580 law, so here's the law fundamentally, if you look at the number of people who are doing, who are, who are in a

00:14:41.580 given domain, who are producing in a given domain, the square root of the people produce half the

00:14:47.420 product, so that means if you have 10 employees, three of them do half the work, but if you have

00:14:52.460 10,000 employees, 100 of them do half the work, right, it's a very, very vicious statistic, and you won't

00:14:59.580 learn about that in psychology for reasons I have no idea about, because you learn about the normal

00:15:04.140 distribution and not the Pareto distribution, but Pareto distributions govern, for example, the distribution

00:15:09.420 of money, which is why one percent of the people in the general population have the overwhelming

00:15:15.180 amount of money, and one-tenth of that one percent has almost all of that, right, so I think it's like

00:15:20.860 the richest hundred people in the world have as much money as the bottom two and a half billion,

00:15:26.700 and you think, well, that's a terrible thing, and perhaps it is, but what you have to understand

00:15:31.260 is that that law governs the distribution of creative production across all creative domains,

00:15:36.700 right, it's something like a natural law, and we can, we'll talk about that more, but

00:15:40.620 imagine what happens when you play monopoly, you've all played monopoly, what happens when you play

00:15:45.020 monopoly, one person ends up with all the money, all right, then you play another game of monopoly,

00:15:50.140 what happens, one person ends up with all the money, it's actually the inevitable consequence of

00:15:55.660 multiple trades that are conducted randomly, so if you take a thousand people and you get them to play

00:16:00.860 a trading game, you get, you each give them a hundred dollars, say, or ten dollars, and they have to trade

00:16:05.420 with another person by flipping a coin, I win the coin toss, you give me a dollar, you win,

00:16:10.700 I give you a dollar, if we all play that long enough, one person will end up with all the money,

00:16:14.860 and everyone else will end up with zero, so it's a deeply built feature of systems of creative

00:16:22.220 production, and no one really knows what to do about it, because of course the danger is is that

00:16:26.220 all the resources get funneled to a tiny minority of people at the top, and a huge section of the

00:16:31.340 population stacks up at zero, but to blame that on the oppressive nature of a given system is to

00:16:38.300 radically underestimate the complexity of the problem, no one actually knows how to effectively

00:16:44.860 shovel resources from the minority that that controls almost everything to the majority that

00:16:50.860 has almost nothing in any consistent way, because as you shovel money down, it tends to move right

00:16:56.940 back up, and it's a big problem, anyways, the reason I'm telling you about that is because

00:17:01.420 after the peasants were granted their land and started to become farmers, a tiny minority of

00:17:06.860 them became extremely successful, and those people produced almost all of the food for Russia and

00:17:12.380 the Ukraine, so what happened in the 1920s when bloody Lenin came along and collectivized the farms was

00:17:18.060 that they defined the kulaks, who were these tiny minority of successful farmers who maybe had a brick

00:17:23.420 house and were able to hire a couple of people and had some land and some livestock and were very

00:17:28.940 productive people, they defined them as socially unfriendly elements and they sent groups of

00:17:33.820 intellectuals out into the towns to collectivize the farms and so the idea was that while you would

00:17:39.260 pool your land and and everyone would farm it collectively and the land was taken away of course

00:17:45.660 from the tiny minority of people who are actually productive and had actually managed to

00:17:49.660 own much of the land, so you have to imagine how that would occur

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00:20:37.980 you know what back in 2008 when the when when we had that economic collapse

00:20:49.340 this strange idea emerged politically and that was the idea of too big to fail

00:20:55.180 and i thought about that idea for a long time because i thought

00:20:58.860 there's something deeply wrong with that is one of the things that made marx wrong

00:21:04.220 was marx believed that capital would flow into the hands of fewer and fewer people

00:21:11.260 and that the dissociation between the rich and the poor would become more extreme as capitalism developed

00:21:17.660 and like so many things that marx said that's it's kind of true it's kind of true in that

00:21:27.260 the distribution of wealth and in fact the distribution of anything that's produced

00:21:33.740 follows a Pareto pattern and the Pareto pattern basically is that a small proportion of people

00:21:38.860 end up with the bulk of the goods and it isn't just money it's it's anything that people produce creatively

00:21:46.140 ends up in that distribution and that's actually the economists call that the matthew principle and

00:21:52.220 they take that from a statement in the new testament and the statement is to those who have everything

00:21:56.860 more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken and it's it's a map of the

00:22:02.940 manner in which the world manifests itself where human creative production is involved and the map

00:22:08.700 seems to indicate that as you start to produce and you're successful the probability that you will

00:22:13.180 continue to be successful or accelerate increases as you're successful and as you fail the probability

00:22:19.020 that you will fail starts to accelerate so in your progress through life looks like this or like

00:22:25.180 this something like that and the reason that marx was right was because he noted that as a

00:22:32.860 feature of the capitalist system the reason that he was wrong is that it's not a feature that's

00:22:37.900 specific to a capitalist system it's a feature that's general to all systems of creative production that

00:22:43.740 are known and so it's like a natural law and it's enough of a natural law by the ways that the

00:22:49.820 distribution of wealth can be modeled by physical models using the same equations that govern the

00:22:55.580 distribution of gas molecules in a vacuum so it's a really profound it's a fundamentally profound

00:23:02.140 observation about the world way the world lays itself out and it's problematic because if resources accrue

00:23:11.340 unfairly to a small minority of people and there's a natural law like element to that that has to be

00:23:19.420 dealt with from a social perspective because if the inequality becomes too extreme then the whole system

00:23:26.540 will destabilize and so you can have an intelligent discussion about how to mitigate the effects of

00:23:33.980 the transfer of creative production into the hands of a small number of people

00:23:39.180 now the other reason however having said that the other reason that marx was wrong there's a number

00:23:45.180 of them one is that even though

00:23:51.420 creative products end up in the hands of a small number of people it's not the same people

00:23:57.580 consistently across time it's the same proportion of people and that's not the same thing you know like

00:24:04.220 imagine that there's water going down a drain and you say well look at the spiral it's permanent you

00:24:09.660 think well the spiral's permanent but the water molecules aren't they're moving through it

00:24:13.740 and it's the same in some sense with the Pareto distribution is that there's a one percent

00:24:18.140 and there's always a one percent but it's not the same people it's and in it the stability of it

00:24:24.540 differs from culture to culture but there's a lot of movement in the upper one percent a tremendous

00:24:30.140 amount of movement and one of the reasons for that movement is that things get large

00:24:36.540 and then they get too large and then they collapse

00:24:39.820 and so in 2008 when the politicians said too big to fail

00:24:45.260 they got something truly backwards as far as i can tell and that was

00:24:52.940 it was a reverse the statement was reversed it should have been so big it had to fail

00:24:57.820 and that's what i think the story of the tower of babel is about it's it's a warning

00:25:04.140 against the expansion of a system

00:25:09.660 until it encompasses everything it's a warning against totalitarian presumptions

00:25:16.620 we figured out how to not have zero-sum games

00:25:19.740 a very very long time ago and it turns out that if the game you're playing isn't zero-sum

00:25:26.140 right it which means that there's only a finite number of resources and everybody has to fight to

00:25:30.700 the death for them and some are going to get the lion's share and others are going to starve

00:25:36.060 if you're not playing a zero-sum game then you can learn to cooperate and compete in an intelligent

00:25:42.060 civilized manner and all of a sudden there's more than enough for everyone now still some people are

00:25:48.220 going to have more than other others you know and but there's nothing how are you going to stop that

00:25:55.580 and do you want to like do you want to only know what do you do you want to only be allowed to know

00:26:01.100 what everyone else knows you don't get to know anything that no one that anyone else knows because

00:26:05.340 it's got to be equal you want everyone to be exactly the same amount of attractive you know which

00:26:11.020 and if you averaged attractiveness overall and you only allowed each person to be as attractive as the

00:26:16.220 average person there'd be not much attractiveness left in the world and it seems to me that that

00:26:21.180 would be quite the loss you know and strength you're not allowed to have any additional strength or or or

00:26:27.660 or ambition or talent or or act or or let's say athletic ability it's like or artistic ability i mean

00:26:36.780 aren't we kind of happy that there's massive inequality in the distribution of talent i know it's it's i know it's

00:26:44.460 harsh and hard but you you can't expect everybody to have every talent that there is and it would be a

00:26:50.300 hell of a sacrifice if no one got to have any talent because it wouldn't be fair and so i don't get the

00:26:56.380 whole equality of outcome thing it isn't it isn't going to work there aren't that many geniuses you know

00:27:04.460 we want to exploit the geniuses and get them to work for us

00:27:10.140 and if the if the if the price is is that somebody has more than you do of something well suck it up

00:27:18.380 for christ's sake well jesus seriously man it's like look how much more do you have than most people have

00:27:28.860 you know you you need so you need to make thirty thousand dollars a year to be in the top one percent

00:27:33.740 of the socio-economic distribution worldwide you know you always hear about the one percent right at

00:27:39.660 the evil one percent and they churn by the way because it's not the same people all the time it's like

00:27:44.780 all of you here are in the evil one percent and you think well that's not very fair because i was really

00:27:50.460 only talking about within my country my well that's convenient for you you know or it makes it really

00:27:57.180 really convenient argument for you it's like well all those other people those foreigners they don't

00:28:02.140 count if they're poor who the hell cares it's it's it's it's it's the australians that matter you know

00:28:08.220 and so no that's that's that's a non-starter you know and and by historical standards you're doing a hell

00:28:13.820 of a lot better than the top one percent i can tell you that i read a nice article by a coalition called

00:28:19.820 human progress the other day and they were comparing the typical middle class person who lives now with

00:28:25.420 uh rockefellers in the nineteen nineteen nineteen and say well would you rather be a middle class

00:28:31.340 person now or nelson rockefeller in 1919 and the answer seemed pretty damn clear that

00:28:38.860 well you know if you were nelson rockefeller then you would have been richer than anyone else and

00:28:43.900 there's something to be said for that status right because people do like to have more than others it's

00:28:48.700 a it's a i don't know if it's a good thing or not but it is one of the things that we like and so

00:28:53.900 you'd have that you'd be richer than everyone else but there'd be all sorts of things that you

00:28:59.020 have that now that nelson rockefeller wouldn't have had a hope of purchasing like the antibiotics that

00:29:07.100 he would have needed to stop his son from dying for example you know just as a start and so

00:29:14.300 so so i think this this this this this complaint about inequality look no one likes inequality exactly

00:29:22.380 you walk down the street this is why i always get a kick out of people who protest uh i'm against

00:29:26.940 poverty it's like really you're against poverty and and you think that's a unique enough

00:29:36.940 attribute so that it was worth your time to make a sign that said that you were against poverty and

00:29:46.380 show other people it's like i've never met i've never met anyone that was for poverty you know you

00:29:55.260 walk down the street with someone who's pretty well off you know and they've got 1920 spats on and a

00:30:00.460 bowler and they're feeling pretty damn rich and the stockster certificate sticking out of their back pocket

00:30:05.580 and you know there's a homeless person there and they give them a good kick and they say

00:30:09.980 the more poverty the better it's like no you know when people walk down the street and you see homeless

00:30:17.500 people and they're often homelessness is a complex problem like you think well homeless people are poor

00:30:24.060 it's like yeah yeah man that's like one problem they have out of 50 and like i've worked with poor

00:30:31.740 people you know in my clinical practice and poor in multiple dimensions and many of them you gave them

00:30:37.900 money they were just done especially if they were like alcoholics and cocaine addicts as long as they

00:30:43.020 were broke they had some hope of living through the next month but as soon as their unemployment check

00:30:49.340 showed up man they were face down in the ditch three days later right nothing but cocaine and alcohol

00:30:55.100 with all their idiot friends for three days and then they'd show up back in my practice saying

00:31:00.140 you know god i relapsed again well what happened well my money came in it's like yeah money's really

00:31:05.900 going to do you a hell of a lot of good it'll just kill you faster than poverty now not that there's

00:31:11.020 anything good about poverty but it's not like these are simple problems you know walk down the street

00:31:15.660 and you see someone who's been an alcoholic for 20 years and maybe they're addicted to methamphetamines

00:31:20.300 as well or maybe they're schizophrenic it's like it isn't unequal distribution of monetary resources

00:31:28.220 that are is the primary cause for that problem and it isn't going to be some sort of straightforward

00:31:35.340 redistribution that's going to fix it because it's way more complicated than that and so

00:31:43.180 and then the whole power thing too it's like look i get it i get the left wing i get the left wing

00:31:49.100 issue and i really do and i i think i get it better than the damn left wingers get it because you know most of

00:31:55.100 the radical types they follow marx and they say well one of marx's dictums was that capital tended to

00:32:01.740 accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and that's right that's true wealth and capital

00:32:09.100 income for that matter but not only that whatever it is that you might like to have accumulates in the

00:32:16.460 hands of smaller and smaller numbers of people it's a principle that was discovered by an economist

00:32:22.060 named pareto vilfredo pareto and he pointed out something that had been pointed out in the gospels

00:32:28.140 by the way thousands of years earlier which was to those who have everything more will be given

00:32:33.260 and from those who have nothing everything will be taken away the rule being once you start to succeed

00:32:39.260 at something the probability that you will continue to succeed ever more rapidly increases

00:32:43.900 so there's expert there's an exponential function with regards to success but there's also an

00:32:49.980 exponential function with regards to failure so failure and and success aren't like this they're like

00:32:57.180 this fail fail die succeed succeed succeed ridiculously like it's this weird curve and and it's funny because

00:33:05.340 it doesn't just characterize economics it's it's a really fun it looks like a really fundamental economic

00:33:10.700 law i was actually quite shocked when i first learned about this which was only about 15 years ago because

00:33:15.740 i thought most things were normally distributed it turns out that that's not true um what people produce

00:33:22.860 creatively isn't normally distributed a small proportion of people produce most of what's of value it

00:33:30.540 doesn't matter what it is and you know this it's like

00:33:32.940 how many books does stephen king sell it's like half the books right and then then there's the next

00:33:42.860 guy after stephen king and no one even knows who he is and he sells like one-tenth as many books as

00:33:48.540 stephen king and then there's author number 50 and out of the thousands and thousands of offers and he's

00:33:56.060 barely scraping by and then there's the bottom 99.9 percent and they can't make a living writing

00:34:03.900 and that's how it is and it's the same with musicians and it's the same with with with athletes

00:34:09.980 you know if you look at number of goals scored for example in hockey i'm a canadian so i'll use that

00:34:15.660 there's a small percentage of absolutely phenomenal hockey players even in something as amazing as the

00:34:22.540 national hockey league or any professional sports league you know you you have to be one hell of an

00:34:26.780 athlete to make it in a professional sports league and still you get this tiny group of superstars who

00:34:34.460 are way better at it than anyone else you know and and so there's this weird rule that as you get more

00:34:41.180 getting even more gets easier and who knows why it is exactly partly it's practice but and it

00:34:47.420 characterizes all sorts of situations like it characterizes the size of planets a small number

00:34:56.780 of planets have almost all the mass it characterizes stars the same way it characterizes biomass in the

00:35:05.500 in the in the amazon jungle it it characterizes city size a small percentage of cities have almost

00:35:12.700 all the people it's like what what it was that and then then you go back 10 000 years you look at a

00:35:18.300 paleolithic gravesite and you see what people are buried with and like there's one guy there's two

00:35:23.500 guys there is this covered with gold right there's the the gravesite is insanely rich and everyone else has

00:35:29.180 like a bone and it's theirs and that's it you know and and so you analyze paleolithic gravesites you

00:35:35.660 see exactly the same periodo distribution a small number of people are buried with all the wealth

00:35:41.020 and almost everyone else has none and so it's this unbelievably deep proclivity of resources to

00:35:50.220 distribute themselves unequally and you know this too because you play games like monopoly right you've

00:35:56.700 all played monopoly what happens when you play monopoly you all start out equal right exactly 100 percent

00:36:04.620 equal and you all have an equal chance of winning because it's basically a game of chance not entirely

00:36:10.220 because you can play stupidly but you know but but you can only play so intelligently because you're at the

00:36:17.020 mercy of the dice and what happens inevitably is that some evil capitalist ends up with all the money and all the

00:36:25.740 hotels and all the houses and just like takes you out and yet you play and you don't think oh my god you know

00:36:32.780 there's something fundamentally unfair about that or maybe or maybe you play non-competitive monopoly

00:36:37.900 where after every round you redistribute the money so everyone

00:36:49.260 right so there's no fun in that and so and so the so the problem with karl marx as far as i'm concerned is

00:36:55.580 that he was nowhere pessimistic enough it's like no you can't blame inequality on capitalism

00:37:02.620 in fact capitalism is pretty good at ameliorating inequality like there's still plenty of inequality

00:37:08.620 in capitalist societies make no mistake about that and you can make some claim although it's a tricky

00:37:14.380 one that it's some indices of inequality have increased over the last 20 years it depends on

00:37:19.340 how you measure it because it's complicated because you know even poorer people now have access to

00:37:24.380 well let's say iphones which have more computational power than the entire system that put the apollo 11

00:37:31.500 on the moon which is you know for 600 which isn't a bad bargain um so so it's not that easy it's not

00:37:38.700 that easy to do those economic calculations but one of the things you can say about capitalism and about

00:37:45.260 private property and about the idea that people have a right to what they earn and a right to what they

00:37:50.220 own is that it's pretty damn good at generating wealth and the wealth isn't equally distributed by

00:37:57.500 any stretch of the imagination but a fair bit of it goes to the bottom and that's why we're seeing well

00:38:03.660 a relative dearth of of tremendous deprivation and you might say well we want to squeeze out that last

00:38:10.380 bit of inequality and it's like well maybe we do and maybe we don't it's not so obvious first of all

00:38:17.100 because even if we did want to we don't know how and we certainly do know that if there are some ways

00:38:23.900 that if we go about it then things really go to hell in a handbasket really fast and everyone's ends

00:38:29.820 up equal because they're all starving and dead you end up in a situation like venezuela not that they're

00:38:35.580 all starving and dead but the average venezuelan lost 17 pounds in the last year and that wasn't from

00:38:41.420 voluntary diet right and that's a very rich country and so we do know that there are ways of

00:38:48.380 ameliorating inequality that just don't work and so it's a dangerous thing to mess with because we

00:38:54.060 don't understand it now you know that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand it and that also

00:38:59.740 doesn't mean that the left doesn't have a point you know if if your society becomes too unequal and too

00:39:05.980 many people stack up at the bottom and they don't have an opportunity to move forward that seems

00:39:11.020 like it's bad for everyone and so we could we could agree on that and we could try to set up our

00:39:16.540 hierarchies so that they're not too brutal for the people who end up at the bottom right that would be

00:39:21.820 nice if we could be sensible and figure out how to do that but i think we're not doing that bad a job of

00:39:27.820 figuring out how to do it we build infrastructure that everybody can use we have universal education

00:39:33.180 systems and so on and they're not perfect but they're they're far from um they're far from

00:39:38.860 catastrophic and they're a hell of a lot better than they were a hundred years ago so we are making

00:39:43.980 some progress on that i think the problem with the radical leftists is that they don't take the

00:39:48.300 problem of inequality seriously enough they blame it on capitalism it's like sorry that's wrong it's a

00:39:55.100 way deeper problem it wasn't capitalism that produced inequality of gravesite wealth distribution

00:40:02.940 in paleolithic europe 10 000 years ago and it's not capitalism that makes some stars have all the

00:40:09.900 mass right it's a different order of problem and so we have to be more sophisticated than economists were

00:40:17.500 150 years ago when we talk about inequality and when we talk about hierarchy we also have to be more

00:40:23.180 sophisticated because we have to start to understand what it means for there to be a human hierarchy

00:40:29.820 and and and and the basis upon which hierarchies actually establish themselves if they're going to

00:40:35.580 be playable iterable civilized productive sustainable um uh what what voluntary that's an important one

00:40:46.700 what what are the characteristics of such things and i think that if we use a little bit of sense

00:40:52.460 we can figure that out too and i like to use the example of plumbers because i actually happen to like

00:40:57.740 plumbers uh partly because i don't like it when my basement is full of sewage and that's happened once

00:41:03.420 or twice and you call a plumber and then that doesn't happen and and i'm i'm i'm pleased about that

00:41:10.540 like i'm sure most of you are you know and plumbers have done an awful lot for the world and there's a big

00:41:15.900 difference between a good plumber and a bad plumber i've had two bad plumbers and the first bad plumber

00:41:23.340 was in montreal and my tap was leaking a little bit and so he came in to fix it and i don't know

00:41:29.020 what the hell he was doing but he was using a torch and he was burning something maybe taking some solder

00:41:34.460 off some pipes underneath the the sink but he lit the wall on fire which wasn't helpful because the

00:41:41.660 wall wasn't on fire before he showed up and so and then and then he forgot to shut the water off at the

00:41:48.940 main pipe when he took the tap apart and so then apart from the fact that my wall was charred my

00:41:55.180 bathroom was completely covered with water and then he sort of panicked and he put the thing back

00:42:00.140 together the tap back together with the with the with the washer which was now extraordinarily damaged

00:42:06.540 and he shut it off and he turned he had figured out to turn the water off at the main valve by then

00:42:11.660 and he turned it back on and he left it was like now the wall was on fire and the

00:42:15.980 floor was covered with water and there was five times as much water running out of the

00:42:22.940 tap this was not an improvement i joked with my wife that he was an anti-plumber you know like like

00:42:29.340 like an anti-matter plumber and if he ever met a real plumber on the road and shook his hand they'd both

00:42:35.420 disappear in a puff of light so so that was one plumber and you know and then another plumber we were we

00:42:44.300 were redoing our house in toronto and it was the day before the drywallers were supposed to come in

00:42:49.100 and so we were working like mad because drywallers like they're fun to watch man they zip in they lift

00:42:54.780 up their piece of drywall they zip it up with their screws and they're really fast at it and it's quite

00:43:00.540 quite a skilled operation and but they're really fast and they don't muck about and so you have to

00:43:04.620 be ready for the drywallers and so this guy had redone all our pipes pvc plastic pipe and you put this

00:43:10.300 that together with a kind of solvent hey so you just put solvent on one end of the pipe the male

00:43:15.420 end and you put it into the female end with some solvent and they stick together and hopefully it

00:43:20.220 seals and he said my joints never leak and so we tested them we went up on this roof three floors up

00:43:28.220 and filled the pipes up with water and his joints leaked like 32 joints leaked we had four inches of water

00:43:35.660 in the basement and this was the day before the drywallers were supposed to show up and then also

00:43:40.380 we found that he had put a lot of the pipes outside of the wall where the drywall was going to be

00:43:46.060 which actually also constitutes a mistake right because i don't know about your house but but my house

00:43:52.380 isn't a house where there's plumbing sticking randomly out of the walls so we had to spend the whole

00:43:58.460 night redoing all the joints and and cutting the pipes and you know putting the way they were supposed

00:44:03.500 to and and so and so that's a bad plumber and so we're going to make the case that there are bad

00:44:10.140 plumbers you know and and and they don't know what they're doing and so so they don't have any skill

00:44:15.900 or maybe they're worse than not skilled they make things worse because that's worse than just not

00:44:21.260 skilled and then you could say well maybe they lie to you when when they deal with you and maybe they

00:44:26.300 overcharge you and maybe they don't treat their employees very well you know and maybe they're not good to

00:44:31.420 live with at home either who the hell knows but they're not good plumbers and so we're going to

00:44:36.220 say that just in the plumbing domain which is an important domain skill matters right that seems

00:44:42.300 reasonable and then we might say the same thing about well what probably matters in law like if you

00:44:48.140 ever need a lawyer i would recommend that you get a good one because if you get a bad one it's going to

00:44:52.780 cost you a lot more than if you get a good one like like everything and you know there are good teachers

00:44:58.860 and not so good teachers and there are good massage therapists and there are good nurses and

00:45:02.940 there are horrible nurses and there are great surgeons and then there are surgeons that will

00:45:07.580 definitely kill you you know and you you want to go to one that won't kill you that's that's the and

00:45:14.060 you you'd assume difference in skill you know and whatever your occupation is you know bloody well

00:45:19.820 maybe you're a short order cook at a diner and like some short order cooks can whip up a pretty damn

00:45:24.940 decent breakfast in three or four minutes and you're pretty bloody happy to sit there and eat it

00:45:29.660 and other short order cooks can produce some god-awful mess of of burnt eggs and wretched toast and

00:45:36.460 rancid bacon and orange juice that's like had a crayon dipped in it for the color and with with a really

00:45:42.620 ornery uh waitress and coffee that's been cooking since like 1953 and there's a that's a big difference in

00:45:50.460 short order cooks there's qualitative difference in skill okay and so one of the things we might

00:45:55.420 point out is that part of the reason that we have hierarchies in the west is because people actually

00:46:00.620 differ in skill not power skill some people are better at whatever it is they're supposed to be

00:46:07.100 doing than other people and we think that what they're supposed to be doing is important so that

00:46:12.220 it matters that they're better at it and we're what are we going to do we're going to deny that skill

00:46:16.860 plays a role all the evidence suggests that it does like if you look at what predicts long-term

00:46:21.660 success from a psychological perspective in a given occupation conscientiousness is the best

00:46:27.500 personality predictor and conscientious people are dutiful and hard-working and they have integrity and

00:46:33.020 they do what they say they're going to do and so that's the best predictor second best predictor and

00:46:37.580 the best predictor is intelligence and so it looks like in a relatively complicated occupation if you're

00:46:43.660 going to be successful in a western culture the best predictors of your success is whether you're

00:46:49.180 intelligent skilled and conscientious and that's pretty good like how else would you want it to be

00:46:56.700 if you're going to set it up and it isn't power because agreeableness is another dimension you can be

00:47:01.820 disagreeable men are more disagreeable than women by the way and if our society was fundamentally based

00:47:08.860 on power then the most disagreeable people would be the most successful and they're not they're the

00:47:14.860 ones that are most likely to be in prison so so that evidence just doesn't support that and then you

00:47:22.060 know the other thing is is you don't have you imagine well our society is fundamentally an oppressive

00:47:28.140 patriarchy and everything's based on power it's like okay so you need a plumber and so what you do

00:47:33.820 is you go out in the street or maybe you don't maybe you cower at home and these like gangs of plumbers

00:47:38.940 come to your house and they're armed to the damn teeth with their pipes and they say look i don't

00:47:43.900 know whether you need like some plumbing work done or not but maybe we'll come in here and break a few

00:47:48.860 things so that so that you do need it but even if we're not going to do that it's like we're the plumbers

00:47:53.980 that are going to take you out unless you call us and so the next time the toilet overflows man

00:47:59.420 here's the number and you better put it on your fridge or there's going to be hell to pay or you

00:48:04.540 know the same is the case of like gang affiliated massage therapists exactly the same thing tattooed to

00:48:12.940 the hill right arm to the teeth and and roaming the streets making bloody sure that if you have a stiff

00:48:19.100 neck that the most powerful massage therapist is the one that you're going to call first you know

00:48:25.100 it's complete bloody rubbish it's absolutely not the case now it is the case that even in a

00:48:33.100 hierarchy that's functional the thing can go sideways and it does you know you get companies

00:48:39.660 that get too big they start to get corrupt people who play politics and who are good at manipulating

00:48:44.940 start to rise up the hierarchy the the structure stops performing its function its useful function in

00:48:52.620 the way that it should it starts to degenerate but generally then it dies you know like the typical

00:48:58.700 fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years and the typical family fortune only three generations it's not

00:49:04.460 that easy to keep a functional enterprise going you have to be awake and so no it's not an oppressive

00:49:14.060 patriarchy our culture that's wrong it's based on competence fundamentally imperfect as that is

00:49:21.340 it's not like we don't make hiring mistakes it's not like there aren't people who are foolish and

00:49:26.060 blind and hire and fire based on attributes that have nothing to do with competence but that's a sign

00:49:33.100 of the deterioration of the system and the corruption of the system and not an indication of its

00:49:38.940 fundamental function and it's also the case that and this is partly what i tried to outline in rule one

00:49:44.620 which is pretty much the rule we're going to discuss today part of your goal if you want to take your

00:49:54.300 place in the hierarchy properly is to be a good person and that was the argument i was trying to make

00:50:00.380 in the chapter not that you're supposed to be like the most brutal crustacean on the block you know it's so

00:50:09.420 foolish it was kathy newman i think that asked me in in the in the uk so you're saying that human

00:50:15.660 society should be organized along the lines of lobsters it's like look lady if you're gonna

00:50:22.780 if you're gonna insult someone you might want to try accusing them of something of believing something

00:50:30.060 that someone somewhere believed at least once in the entire history of the human race and not

00:50:37.500 that yes absolutely lobsters for everyone you know that's how what i was trying to make the case was

00:50:44.220 that we have this very old system in our nervous systems which is very old which keeps track of

00:50:50.540 where we are in hierarchies and that regulates our emotions because of it because it's really important

00:50:56.780 to you and you and you and you if you're not completely bloody psychopathic that you have a place in

00:51:02.780 a social hierarchy and that you're admired and respected and valued by other people and it's so

00:51:08.220 important that that the neurochemical system that keeps track of that regulates your other emotions so

00:51:14.780 that if you're low on the totem pole because well for whatever the reason happens to be sometimes you

00:51:21.100 deserve it sometimes it's accidental sometimes you've been hurt there's lots of ways that that that that this

00:51:27.180 can happen your serotonin levels plummet like a defeated lobster and then you you feel way more

00:51:33.100 negative emotion about everything and way less positive emotion about everything and that's

00:51:38.380 absolutely dreadful like it's it's that's clinical depression and it's a terrible terrible condition

00:51:44.780 and so it's absolutely crucial that you maintain a tenable position in a hierarchy and not of one of

00:51:52.620 power but one of competence and at least even if you're not in a position that's tenable you're

00:51:58.620 moving upward towards one that's tenable because that at least gives you hope you know because maybe

00:52:04.300 you're young and useless and you don't know what the hell you're doing you're just getting started

00:52:07.980 and so you're low man on the totem pole but it's not like you're stuck there forever you do some decent

00:52:13.260 work i had some kid tell me the other day it was really nice it was just last night was it a comedy

00:52:18.780 show i went to here and um a lot of the comedians knew us dave rubin and i went in there and so

00:52:25.420 a lot of them knew us which was quite interesting and one of them said god you know i was in a rough

00:52:29.980 shape two years ago i was just getting married i just got married i was nihilistic as hell and

00:52:34.380 depressed and bitter and things weren't going well for me at all and uh and i was unemployed and one

00:52:41.100 of my friends got me a job and he said i really liked a bloody job i didn't want to have the job and

00:52:45.900 i was kind of dragging my ass to the work and not doing it well and i listened to one of your

00:52:50.300 lectures and it said look if you haven't got anything going for you but you have a job don't quit your

00:52:57.420 job hey whether you hate it or not it's like man that's what you're hanging on to the edge of the world

00:53:03.740 with your fingertips you know don't let go oh if you can find a better job okay fine but you don't just

00:53:09.580 quit because then what you're done and he and he said and another thing that i had mentioned was uh

00:53:15.980 why don't you just try to work as hard as you can at your damn job for like six weeks

00:53:20.220 right all flat out you know if you work 10 percent longer hours you make 40 percent more money

00:53:27.580 that's something worth thinking about you know you've got a job maybe you show up 15 minutes early

00:53:32.140 and you leave 15 minutes late you know and you actually work and your boss notices because he would

00:53:37.260 probably notice and then maybe someone's going to get promoted and maybe it'll be you because

00:53:42.860 something's going to tilt the scales and that little extra bit of work done without cynicism

00:53:49.660 and resentment might be enough well he said he started at 21 bucks an hour and in six weeks he was making

00:53:55.100 37 an hour and it's not a king's ransom man but it's a hell of a lot more than zero and it's quite a lot

00:54:01.580 more than 21. he said his life had turned around substantially because he learned if he put some

00:54:06.540 damn effort into it and i'm not trying to be joe optimist here like i know that people hit runs of

00:54:13.180 bad luck and that things can take you out of life right unfortunate illnesses and and and and and

00:54:19.980 betrayal and like there's no shortage of randomness and horror that can wipe you out even if you're doing

00:54:25.900 your best but you don't have a better bloody plan than to do your best and it tends to work a lot

00:54:32.860 better than you think and what's so interesting about the hierarchies that people set up is that

00:54:37.980 that's how they're set up they're not set up on power they're set up on reciprocity and skill and trust

00:54:45.900 not always you know and if you're in a job where you work hard and you're a good guy and and you're doing

00:54:51.180 your best and your boss is a bloody tyrant and you never get a break it's like okay fine you're you're

00:54:57.820 you're in a foucault world get the hell out of it you know you get your resume set up write your cv

00:55:06.380 fill in the educational gaps that you can have that you have send out your 25 resumes a day

00:55:12.140 and prepare to make a lateral move because you're in a bad place but almost everywhere and this certainly

00:55:17.580 been the case virtually everywhere i've worked and i've had like 50 jobs you know if you go above

00:55:25.180 and beyond the call of duty you know and wake an intelligent way interpersonally socially with

00:55:31.900 regards to the diligence of your work with regards to the truth of your attitude and your courage and

00:55:36.540 all of that that will work and you know if you try it for a year and it doesn't work then go somewhere

00:55:42.540 else because you can right you're free i mean it's not easy you you can't just walk out the door

00:55:47.500 and instantly find another job but you're not enslaved you could make a move you could even

00:55:52.540 decide that you're going to make a move and double your salary you know it's not a bad goal and it's

00:55:56.860 certainly a possibility it's like it isn't hierarchy it's ethics that determines success in a functional

00:56:04.700 society it's ethics that determines success not power the rest of it's a bloody lie and that doesn't

00:56:11.420 mean that all our systems are perfectly ethical you know you got to be awake if you're in a system

00:56:16.780 there's going to be some corruption in it part of what you're supposed to do is keep your damn eyes

00:56:20.940 open for the corruption and your mouth speaking truth so when the corruption starts to take root

00:56:25.820 you object to it so the whole damn system doesn't turn into a pathological power play and that's part of

00:56:31.740 your ethical responsibility as a conscious being an ethical being a religious being for that matter

00:56:38.140 and a citizen you know and and you're charged with that that's why you're that's why you vote that's

00:56:44.220 why you're the cornerstone of your state man you're you're the you're the you're the what would you call

00:56:49.340 you're the you're the wellspring of the ethical actions that replenish the dying world that's what you

00:56:57.580 are and if you if you act that's really that's what you are and if you act that out properly then

00:57:05.340 things work and that's why that's always been described as ethical behavior it's not because

00:57:10.220 you're supposed to be good you know and being good isn't that easy anyways and it certainly doesn't

00:57:14.780 mean being nice and harmless it's not an easy thing to be good you have to be tough as a damn

00:57:20.300 boot to be good because you have to stand your ground when you need to stand your ground and you have

00:57:24.860 to be able to say no when it's time to say no and you have to mean it and so then you have to think and

00:57:30.380 plan strategically so that when you're going to say no you can mean it and it will stick you know and

00:57:36.300 that takes a certain amount of that takes a certain amount of integrated malevolence i would say and and

00:57:43.100 once it's integrated it's not malevolence it's strength it's it's strength of character it's the ability

00:57:48.860 to stand your ground and you have to cultivate that and you cultivate that at least in part by telling

00:57:54.220 the truth and so you take your place in the world as a decent person and as a decent citizen and then

00:57:59.660 and you play the hierarchical game properly and that is to stand up straight with your shoulders back

00:58:04.860 it's like the world's an onslaught you've got the tyranny of culture to deal with you've got the

00:58:10.220 catastrophe of nature you've got your own damn malevolence and ignorance right all coming at you

00:58:15.740 plus the incredible complicated indeterminate potential of the future that's all coming at you

00:58:22.700 and it's all your responsibility and you can cringe away from it and be afraid of it and be

00:58:27.180 victimized by it and be bitter and cynical about it and and no wonder because it can be painful or you

00:58:33.100 can turn around and you can say man bring it on because there's more to me than there is to the

00:58:38.220 catastrophe and this is what i discovered from looking at what i looked at i looked at the darkest

00:58:43.980 things i could look at really for 30 years i was really a lot of fun to be around i can tell you

00:58:49.340 i looked at the darkest things that i could think of right not only what happened in auschwitz and

00:58:54.460 what happened in the gulag but but personal issues you know it's like i wasn't so much interested in

00:59:00.300 the totalitarians as a group i was interested in the people who undertook the terrible acts that the

00:59:06.140 totalitarians required you know the people who i was just rereading ordinary men and it was a story

00:59:11.820 about a police battalion in poland that trained ordinary policemen to take naked pregnant women out into

00:59:17.740 the fields and and and shoot them in the back of the head it takes a lot of training by the way

00:59:23.740 before you can bring yourself to do that and you aren't the same person by the end of it it's pretty

00:59:28.620 goddamn horrific you know when i was trying to figure out what would it be like to be that person

00:59:35.740 because we are that person and then what would it be like to not be that person right to refuse to

00:59:42.700 do that to not participate in that you know and and what i discovered by making that totalitarian

00:59:48.700 proclivity personal was that there was there's more to us than there is to the horror his nature

00:59:56.140 is bent on our destruction bad as culture is tyrannical and bloody back as far as you can look

01:00:02.140 as malevolent as you are in in the darkest part of your heart and that's plenty malevolent the the

01:00:09.260 the possibility that's within you that can well up the the courage and the truth and the ability

01:00:14.460 and the skill and and the and the willingness to set things right if you are willing to set them right

01:00:20.940 is more powerful than all of that and so it's so interesting it was it was proof for me of an old

01:00:27.500 saying i i read from carl jung it's an alchemical motif in sterquilinus inventor which is

01:00:34.300 what you most want to be found will be found where you least want to look essentially and it's so

01:00:40.220 interesting because it means that if you're willing to turn around and to stand up say and stand up

01:00:46.060 straight and face the darkness like fully what you discover at the darkest part is the brightest light

01:00:56.620 and that's something that's so much worth discovering because there's going to be terrible darkness in

01:01:03.660 your life and it's going to make you cynical and bitter and it could easily be that you're just not

01:01:09.100 looking at it enough because if you looked at it enough and you didn't shy away and you brought

01:01:14.940 everything you had to bear on it you'd find that there was more to you than there was to the horror

01:01:22.620 you know i watched my father-in-law i'll end with this and you know you don't know eh because you're not

01:01:32.300 bringing your a game to the table with all that cynicism and bitterness and resentment and willful

01:01:38.300 blindness and avoidance maybe you're playing at 60 percent it's not good enough because there's too much

01:01:44.380 of what's bad for 60 percent to be good enough it's like you need 90 percent or 95 percent or 100 percent

01:01:51.980 my when when when about 15 20 years ago my mother-in-law developed um pre frontal temporal

01:02:02.540 dementia which i wouldn't recommend you know it's one of those degenerative neurological diseases like

01:02:08.060 alzheimer's and those bloody things are like they're in the top echelon of awful you know you watch a

01:02:15.180 person deteriorate before your eyes it's a lengthy lengthy death and and it was slow and her husband

01:02:24.700 he was he lived in this little town that i grew up in about 3 000 people and he was quite a character

01:02:29.980 man everybody knew him i bought him a foghorn leghorn t-shirt once because that's kind of what he was

01:02:35.500 like he's loud and sort of bombastic but he stood up straight i can tell you and he played the fool a

01:02:40.380 little bit mostly for the amusement of people but he was no damn fool and and i always admired him and

01:02:46.220 liked him and and the feeling was was mutual thank god since i married his daughter and uh you know he

01:02:53.180 drank a lot with his crazy friends up in northern alberta and he wasn't at home a lot because he was

01:02:57.740 working a lot and and you know he was kind of a party animal about town but a good businessman and a good

01:03:04.140 man and and then his wife got sick and they moved to another town and you know he took care of her for

01:03:12.300 like 15 years it was unbelievable as she deteriorated you know and she got more desperate to have him

01:03:19.180 around and her love for him never never went away even in even as she lost herself almost completely

01:03:27.180 she would always light up when when he came into the room you know and he took care of her right

01:03:35.660 till within weeks of her death he had to finally put her in an old folks home because he was no longer

01:03:39.900 strong enough to lift her up from the chair and we interacted with him a lot you know because we

01:03:45.340 were trying to help him figure out how to cope and we had signs put up in the house electronic signs that

01:03:50.860 would tell her when she when he was leaving so that she would know where he went and we had

01:03:56.460 recordings in the bathroom so that she knew what to do when she went into the bathroom and we tried to

01:04:00.860 do everything we could to not make this absolutely bloody atrocious experience complete hell and he

01:04:08.060 participated the whole way you know and it was really something to see it was really uh i really left

01:04:13.900 me with a tremendous sense of admiration for him but but not just for him but for people who can do that

01:04:20.780 you know and if if if there was a new decline he took it on and and he didn't complain about it

01:04:26.140 and he tried to do what he could you know and and like it was no picnic don't get me wrong but it

01:04:31.100 wasn't hell and and then we were all gathered around the deathbed her mother's my my wife's mother's

01:04:36.860 deathbed and the family was there and they got along pretty well you know and her sister's a palliative

01:04:42.220 care nurse and the other one's a pharmacy a pharmacist and none of them are particularly afraid of of

01:04:47.660 illness and death you know they're a pretty tough group and so you know they made sure their mother's

01:04:52.300 lips were wet while she was no longer eating or drinking and and tried to make her comfortable and

01:04:57.020 they're around the deathbed and they were kind of getting along you know it wasn't family feud at

01:05:01.900 mother's death time and that was kind of nice and and she died and and that was that and but it wasn't

01:05:09.660 just that because the fact that the family had coped with it well and nobly and honorably i would say

01:05:16.060 brought them together they were closer afterwards than they were before and they all had more respect

01:05:21.740 for their father and then in the old old in the old folks home he met another woman who had a husband

01:05:28.540 there who had alzheimer's and they got to know each other you know and he died after a while and she died

01:05:34.300 after a while and then a few months later they started going out and then eventually they had a

01:05:39.420 relationship and now they live together and so he gained something like it wasn't that he replaced what

01:05:44.700 he lost you know what i mean because he still has pictures of his of his wife up in his house and

01:05:50.700 she was the love of his life and that's not going away but you know his family respected him more and

01:05:55.900 everybody pulled together more and it wasn't hell at the deathbed it was just tragedy and the family

01:06:01.580 pulled together more and that was a good example of of how you can extract at least a certain amount of

01:06:07.420 light out of what out of out of what's dark even at a personal level and it's worth asking yourself it's

01:06:14.140 like drop what you're doing that's foolish that you know is foolish and pick a name that's worthwhile

01:06:21.900 you know to make things better for yourself like you're worth taking care of like you're worth something

01:06:27.100 you know and to surround yourself with people who who believe the same and who are what rejoicing in

01:06:33.420 your accomplishments and unhappy when you fail right and you're comparing yourself to your

01:06:39.740 accomplishments of yesterday and not to someone else's today so that you're not jealous and bitter

01:06:44.540 and you put your own house in order so that you're not cursing the world when some of its disarray might

01:06:50.380 be your fault and you're trying to pursue something meaningful and you're doing your best to tell the truth

01:06:55.820 and all of that and then you see what happens who the hell are you you know you think you're a

01:07:02.940 miracle of some bloody bizarre sort we've been around for three and a half billion years you know

01:07:08.860 every single one of your relatives propagated successfully and here you are against all possible

01:07:15.820 odds in this in this world of hell in some sense and and and and bitterness and and and and and tyranny

01:07:24.700 and malevolence and yet god only knows what's inside you this capacity for consciousness the capacity

01:07:31.340 to confront potential and to turn it into something good that's us man that's the western story that's

01:07:39.340 the individual as the cornerstone of the state that's our responsibility and it really is who we are

01:07:47.580 and so we need to know that and we need to remember it and we need to act it out and then maybe we can

01:07:52.860 see what we can do about it you know and see how good we could make things and maybe that would be the

01:07:57.980 purpose of your damn life right not to be happy it's like there's problems to be solved be happy after

01:08:05.260 you solve the goddamn things right

01:08:15.180 so i learned because i looked at dark things that i learned that the light was more powerful than the

01:08:19.740 darkness as far as that i was concerned and that people were re capable each of us of remarkable things

01:08:25.980 and that we need to know that that's what we are we're this consciousness that confronts potential

01:08:31.660 with all its catastrophe that's what we are that's what makes us in the image of god that's what gives

01:08:36.940 us our intrinsic value and that idea that we have intrinsic value that's the bedrock presupposition of

01:08:43.660 our state we're going to question that or we're going to live it out better to live it out find out who you are

01:08:50.540 that you are thank you very much

01:09:11.340 so

01:09:20.540 You

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 04, 2021

200. Exploring the Pareto Principle

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