Lecture: 12 Rules for Life Tour - Melbourne, Australia.

[Applause] Man, that's a lot of Australians. Well, thank you very much for coming out. It's really quite something to see all of you here. As Dave said, this is the largest venue that we've spoken at. I had a couple of debates with Sam Harris, one in Dublin and one in London, that were in larger venues, but as far as speaking specifically about 12 Rules, this is oh damn near twice as big as the next biggest auditorium. I think we were at the Apollo in London and it held 3,000 people, and so that was good, but this is really something.

There must be quite a dearth of things to do in Melbourne tonight. [Laughter] No, seriously though, it's remarkable to see all of you come out to engage in what I believe to be fundamentally a serious conversation about psychological, philosophical, and perhaps certainly ethical, perhaps even religious issues. And you know, who would have ever guessed that there was a mass market for that? You know, so and apparently there is. And maybe we're smarter than we think we are, and I have a suspicion that that might be the case.

One of the things that I've noticed about the intellectual dark web types, you know, that's a name that Eric Weinstein—you might be familiar with him—came up with. And it wasn't like we all got together and built a little fort out in our backyard and you know called it the intellectual dark web. He just happened to coin the term, and a number of people were included for one reason or another. And I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to understand why that coinage stuck and what it might be that united this very strangely diverse range of people. And I think it's really three things. One is that each of them—from Joe Rogan to Shapiro, the same with Sam Harris—are all people, on Dave, are all people who have their independent media platforms, right? They're not part of a corporate structure. They're not beholden to anyone; they're financially independent.

And they've built that themselves. And so they can say what they want. And so that's kind of cool to see that happening—to see the technology that enables online video, which is really a complex form of broadcasting, and also online podcasts, which is a complex form of radio, enable that sort of independent journalism. And to see people able to, not precisely exploit that, but make use of it, that's a very good thing.

And I’m thinking that that might be a real positive outcome of the social media revolution. I mean, there's lots of downsides. I think Twitter is a downside. It's a pretty rough platform, and the commentary on social media platforms can be pretty brutal. We really haven't figured out how to regulate it well yet so that it's civilized, not so that it's censored. Right? Because that’s a mistake. Censored and civilized aren’t the same thing. Properly regulated is civilized, and we don’t know how to do that. But YouTube and podcasts have opened up a huge market for intellectual material in a manner that's never really happened before.

And you're also seeing this happen with audiobooks. You know, the audiobook market has absolutely exploded in the last five years. About a third of books sold now are audiobooks. And that seems to be because people having become accustomed to podcasts are downloading audiobooks and listening to them in their cars or when they're exercising or when they're doing housework. And, you know, one of the advantages of this new media type is that you have it on demand, and you can play it at your leisure or when you're working, for that matter.

And so, you know, I have all sorts of working-class guys come up and talk to me after the show—long-haul truck drivers and those sorts of people who have a lot of time. You know, obviously they're concentrating on what they're doing, but they have spare time to listen, and they're listening to, you know, three-hour Joe Rogan podcasts on all sorts of abstract subjects, and my lectures as well. And it's really something to see that happening.

And so that's one element of the intellectual dark web that's interesting and tied in with the new media revolution because it really is a revolution to have video on demand like that and to have it so easy to produce and to have it permanent and to have it distributed everywhere in the world and to have it subtitled in all sorts of different languages and to have it essentially free of charge and able to be produced in a day or two. I mean, it's and then it's permanent like a book. It's really something new.

And then the same with the audio version. And I do believe it may be the case that more people can—like a lot of people are intimidated by books for all sorts of reasons. I mean, highly literate reading is a relatively rare skill. It's not overwhelmingly rare, but it's relatively rare. But listening, man, people can listen, you know? And so all of a sudden this complicated information is available to people who can listen, and maybe that's 10 times as many people who are likely to read or maybe it's 50 times as many people who are likely to read. So, God only knows what the consequence of that is going to be. That could be a real education revolution, and hopefully we'll be smart enough to take advantage of that carefully over the next 10 years and find out if that is the case.

I'm optimistic about it because one of the things that really is cool about the internet is that, you know, if you want to learn something you can pretty much type in your question, whatever it is, and somebody will have put up a YouTube video that tells you how to do it. And, you know, you might have to sort through two or three of them before you find someone who's done a very high-level job of the explanation, but they've done it. And often, you know, they run an ad maybe and monetize a little bit, but mostly I would say it's an altruistic gesture.

And so that's really something. And the other thing the intellectual dark web people have in common is that, well, they're opinionated and fairly tough-minded. But more importantly, they don't think their audience is stupid—and that's really something. And I think they're right. I'm not going to assume instantaneously that that's a consequence of something particularly moral about the people who make up that group. I think it is a testament to their faith in the essential nature—in the essential quality of human nature.

But I also do think it's a reflection of the medium itself because it's funny when I step into a television studio now—like a classic television studio—which happens from time to time, and which is apparently going to happen with Australia's Q&A on the 25th, which should be quite interesting. Yes, strangely enough, I'm actually looking forward to that because I've been feeling a lot better recently, and so it'd be actually nice to have a conversation with a journalist when I wasn't feeling half-dead and to see how that goes.

So, it'd be nice to have a conversation at one point when I was at the top of my game. And so I don't know if I'm at the top of my game right now, but I am definitely feeling a lot better than I have for a long time. So, yeah, thank God for that, man. It's—hopefully that will be reflected in some reasonable quality of discourse tonight and perhaps a tiny bit of wit, but we'll see how that goes.

So, when I step into an old-school television studio, it feels like 1975 in some sense. You know, the person I'm talking to isn't really there. They're really a speaking device for the corporation. And they have to be because the corporation, which is running high-band, you know, high-expense low-bandwidth television, where every minute or every second is extraordinarily expensive, they can't really take risks. They can't have free-flowing conversations on the off chance that something goes dreadfully wrong—and it might.

And so everything is scripted, and then, you know, you have 30 seconds to make your point. And like there's just some things you can't say in 30 seconds. You know, you have to compress them down to the point where they're actually foolish. It’s actually foolish to try to do it, but you know, what else do you have? Whereas with these long-form conversations, man, you can actually have a discussion about something. You can try to get to the bottom of it, and so that's pretty cool.

And then, and then it turns out that people will actually follow along. Like I was actually absolutely stunned by—I had four debates with Sam Harris earlier this year, two in Vancouver and one in Dublin and one in London. And each of them lasted about three hours. And we were going to do a Q&A for each of them, but as it turned out, while we were talking, we got into the conversation and then we asked the audience to vote by clapping whether we should continue the conversation or move to the Q&A.

And it was overwhelming. The majority of people wanted the conversation to continue. And so basically what happened was something approximating a 12 to 15-hour continuous conversation about the relationship between facts and values or science and religion. You know, and that's a fairly solid philosophical discussion. And that isn't necessarily the case that Sam and I are the two people in the world who would be most qualified to undertake such a discussion, but you know, we did our best, and it was a pretty high-level conversation. I mean, for me, it was approximately the level I think that would characterize a pretty decent PhD dissertation defense.

And that's fairly high-level intellectual conversation, and the audience was just with us the entire time. And so that's cool, man. You know, it could easily be that our relatively primitive initial mass communication technologies like television made us look a lot stupider, even to ourselves, than we actually were because everything had to be compressed to a very short period of time. Everything had to be scripted, so it couldn't be spontaneous discussion.

You couldn't assume that your audience knew anything because maybe it was the first time they watched the show. You couldn't assume that they remembered anything because you didn't know, like if it was a series, whether they had participated in the entire series. You had to aim at the lowest common denominator, and you couldn't assume much of an attention span. But it turns out that people have an incredible attention span.

You know, like I was just re-watching Breaking Bad, and I don't know how many hours Breaking Bad is. It's like what this, six seasons must be 60 hours, I think. Something like that. And it's really, it's a continuous 60-hour movie, and that's a long movie. And it's really engrossing. And there's all sorts of other shows that are perhaps of equal complexity, and man, people have no problem with them at all, right? They just eat them up.

So it turns out that, well, it turns out maybe we're not so stupid. And so that'd be nice if we weren't so stupid. And I'm kind of tired of everyone assuming that we are. Just like I'm tired of everyone assuming that we're some sort of cancer on the planet. You know, I don't like that attitude about human beings. I think there's something deeply, deeply wrong about it.

You know, this is something, something that's just kind of an interesting historical tidbit. Back in the late 1800s there was a biologist named Thomas Huxley, and he was the famous novelist Aldous Huxley's, I think, great-grandfather, perhaps grandfather. And a very intelligent man, and a very, very gifted family. And Huxley was a great defender of Darwin, by the way, too. And he was commissioned by the English government to do a study of oceanic resources. This was back in the 1890s.

And because the English at that point were concerned to some degree that, you know, maybe it would be possible that we would overfish and cause trouble because of that. And Huxley did an exhaustive study, and he concluded that there were so—there's so much ocean and there's so much resource in the ocean that there wasn't a possibility that human beings, with their rather puny technologies, could ever do anything but put a small dent in the absolute overwhelming plenitude of the water that covers more than half the planet.

And so that's only 130 years ago, thereabouts. That's not that long. You know, that's two relatively old men ago. It's not that long. And, you know, you put them back to back, sort of. And so that's yesterday in some sense. And it really wasn't at all until the 1960s that we had some sense that we had developed technologically to the point where some of what we could do mechanically might start to have planetary repercussions. Say with, you know, we saw that with air quality in cities, for example, and the denuding of the countryside, and then perhaps the overfishing in relationship to the oceans, which started to happen after World War II.

But nobody had any sense really until 1960 that, well, maybe we had to take care of things a little bit better than we were because there were more of us. We were starting to become a force that was to some degree a match for nature, you know? And bloody well thank God for that, you know, because nature was more than a match for us for a very long period of time, right? Our species has come up through epochs, eons of absolute brutal privation and difficulty and starvation and freezing temperatures and burning in the desert sun and lack of water and lack of hygienic facilities and, like, just hand-to-mouth suffering.

And you know, we've managed to organize ourselves to the point where that's still the lot of a substantial number of people on the planet, but that's decreasing very rapidly. You know, the UN now projects that by the year 2030, abject poverty—which is defined as living on less than a dollar ninety a day in today's US money—will be eradicated. There won't be anybody in the world that poor. And the cynics say, "Well, that's a pretty damn low barrier, let's say."

But if you double it, you also see that's decreasing very rapidly. And if you triple it, you see that's decreasing very rapidly. And you've got to draw the bloody line somewhere, you know? And abject poverty is abject poverty, and the fact that it's decreased by 50 percent in the last 12 years—from 2000 to the year 2012—we've decreased the absolute level of abject poverty in the world by 50 percent, right? It was the fastest economic—it was the most spectacular economic miracle in the history of humankind. And you know, you hardly ever hear about it. Hardly anyone knows about it.

It's like, it's a bloody miracle. There's more middle-class people in the world now than non-middle-class people, and there are way more obese people than there are starving people. And so that's something to celebrate, you know? I mean, it's a funny thing to celebrate, but it's quite the thing to celebrate. And the fastest growing economies in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa, and they're growing at five to seven percent a year.

So it looks like the economic miracle that took place in India, and in China, and most of Southeast Asia is really starting to kick in in Africa. And it seems, at least in part, it's because of the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1989 and the lack of overt pressure to have African countries pursue the most pathological possible economic doctrines that anybody could ever imagine. They just stopped doing that, and it has freed people up to start to become, well if not rich, at least richer, and at least with the possibility of a continual rise upward.

You know, the child mortality rate in Africa now is the same as it was in Europe in 1952. I mean, that's really something, you know? And longevity rates have increased tremendously in Africa, and you know, we're kicking the slats out of some major diseases. Polio is pretty much gone. It looks like we're putting a pretty good dent in malaria. That'll do great things for Africa, I think.

There's a real possibility with some concerted effort that we could get rid of tuberculosis in the next 15 years or so if we made that a target. That would be something, you know? That's an ancient scourge of mankind. We could certainly do without that. So, and there are intelligent people who are working hard on trying to eradicate these problems, and they're doing it successfully.

And so, you know, I'm not in favor of the whole—there's something wrong with humanity, and we're a scourge on the bloody planet, and it would be better off if there were fewer of us, and the whole planet would be thriving if there were none of us at all. I think that there's something unbelievably dangerous about that attitude, and I think it's ungrateful and unfair and unsympathetic and unempathetic because I really do see that like I know—I don't know a lot about human history because God, there's a lot of history to know about, you know?

And the more you know about human history, the more you know that there are just endless details that you have no idea about. But if you do a reasonable overview, you do see that it's a bloody mess, you know? That it's privation and war and catastrophe and brutality and struggle and strife and difficulty all the entire way through. You know, people striving against odds that are just absolutely astronomical, and yet succeeding.

You know, that overall, the story overall is one of, I wouldn't say unbroken progress, but it's decent progress, and it's better now than it's ever been by a huge margin. And there's every bit of evidence to suggest that it could continue to get better and better and better. You know, here's another thing that's really cool. Do you know that we're adding four years of life expectancy every year now?

So once we hit a year every year, then that's it—we don't die anymore. But those last eight months a year, they're going to be tough to manage, you know? But four months a year is really something, and so you know, we're basically living longer, and we're living healthier, and we're smarter than we were because we're much more—our nutritional levels are higher than they were. Because we're not starving, especially the people at the bottom end.

And you know, we're educating people all over the world. The Chinese graduate more engineers every year than the US has engineers now. That's terrifying because God, we've got all these engineers already, and they're making gadgets at such a rate that you can't even keep track of the gadgets. Right? You go online and like there's all these technologies and all these subcultures using them, and you don't even know what the technologies are.

If you're fully informed, you can't keep up with the new stuff that you might buy. And it's not like it's trivial technology; it's unbelievably powerful technology. Like I'm in awe of many of the young people that I work with because they're more competent. They're savvier about the technological infrastructure that constitutes the web than I am, because I'm old and it's hard to keep up as you get older.

And you know, they come up with tools to make difficult things very simple very rapidly, and there's just subcultures everywhere that are doing this at an unbelievably rapid rate. You know, when you go to somewhere like Silicon Valley—and I've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley—it has its problems, but Jesus, there's an unbelievable collection of smart people there, and they're working on things like mad, and it's working.

You know, you see someone like Elon Musk—what the hell do you make of someone like that? You know, I mean, what did he do? He made an electric car, which is basically impossible, and it works, which is basically impossible. And then he built an infrastructure so that you could charge the damn thing wherever you drove, and that was basically impossible. And then he made it cheap because if you buy an electric car and you factor in the price of gas, the electric car is actually about as expensive as the gasoline car.

And so that was unbelievable. Then he built a bloody rocket which was one-tenth the price or less of a NASA rocket that you could reuse, which was impossible. And then he put one of his cars on top of the rocket and he shot it up into space, and then this happened! Right? This all happened, and he's still alive. And you know, and then he went and blew it all by smoking pot on Joe Rogan, you know? Because—because, well, it's so funny.

You know, we like our insane geniuses to be predictable and safe, and so we don't want them doing strange things like having a tiny puff of marijuana on a show famous for marijuana. So anyway, you know, that's all good news. It's all good news, man. And I learned a lot about this. I worked for the UN for a while, like indirectly, and I wasn't paid for it, by the way. It was volunteer work.

I worked on this document, which was the report to the Secretary-General on sustainable economic development. It's quite funny because a lot of the right-wing conspiracy theorists are having a field day with that, man, that I'm some sort of, like, closet globalist chill because I worked momentarily for the UN. It's like, well, what the hell are you supposed to do when you're asked to do something like that? You know?

There was a document that was being prepared that was supposed to lay out some halfway intelligent vision of what things might be like if the international community cooperated for the next 30 years. It wasn't like there weren't brutal guidelines that were going to be enforced by jack-booted Nazis. It was just a proposal paper. And so we had a chance to work on it. There was only one Canadian team, and I got placed on that, and that was kind of cool.

And so it gave me an opportunity to spend two years reading about economics and about ecology at the same time. And so, and what was so weird about that was the more I read, the more optimistic I got. And I thought, well, that isn't what I expected. Like, I thought we were going to hell in a handbasket at quite the rapid rate.

And you know, I mean, there's no doubt that we're doing some stupid things, and I would say the stupidest thing we're probably doing is overfishing the oceans because there's just no use. It's just there's just no use in that. It's completely destructive. It doesn't do anybody any good, and it could be stopped. But I know that your country, for example, is starting to put aside marine park reserves that are fishery-free essentially.

And you don't need a lot of that before the ocean can regenerate itself because it's actually pretty good at that. One of the things that's kind of funny, you know, remember when that big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico happened? You know, there were more fish there two years later than there were before the spill. You know why? Because people stopped fishing. So it turned out that the pollution was really good for the fish.

It's like, yeah, well, that's why you have to do your research carefully because you never know, you know, you never know what's true and what isn't. And so that was pretty interesting. The same thing happened in World War II, by the way, in the North Sea because the North Sea had been fished out pretty badly. And then during World War II, it wasn't all that safe to go out and fish in the North Sea because, you know, you would get sunk by a submarine and that was not very bright.

So people stopped fishing, and the fish came back very rapidly, and fish do that because they breed quite quickly. And so if you just leave the damn things alone for a while, most of them come back. But you know, apart from the fisheries—which is really quite an appalling and pessimistic story, although not hopeless—and people are waking up to it and building these marine reserve parks, for example, a lot of the ecological news was surprisingly good, way better than I thought it would be.

You know, so for example, there are more forests in the Northern Hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago. So who would have guessed that? I wouldn't have guessed that. Partly it's because marginal farmland has returned to forest. And because we've got more effective at agriculture by a huge margin—and there are more forests in China than there were 30 years ago, and so that's something.

And it turns out when people burn coal—which is, you know, kind of polluting—they don't burn wood. So, you know, they're going to burn something because they don't like eating raw inedible things and freezing to death. So they're going to burn something, and it turns out that coal is actually preferable to wood.

And so, well, these things are complicated, and the ecological story looked better than I would have ever guessed. Even the overpopulation issue, you know, ever since the 1960s with Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb, there was this terrible pessimism that we were going to breed, you know, like uncontrolled rats until every square inch of the world was covered with some starving skeleton, and that that was all going to happen by the year 2000 when there would be mass starvation and the price of commodities would have blown through the roof when we would run out of oil and all the commodities that we need to maintain a reasonably standard, reasonably high standard of living.

And you know, that didn't happen. And not only did it happen, is that rates of poverty went down and rates of hunger went down, even though the population went way up. And so there are more people who are hungry now than there were 50 years ago, but there are far fewer proportion of people who are hungry, and that's really something. And so the overpopulation doom and gloomers were absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

And we're going to peak at 9 billion—that's what it looks like. All the projections indicate something around 9 billion. And that's only 2 billion more than we have. Like, it's not nothing—it's still two billion people—but we're—but at the rate at which we're improving agricultural output and with regards to efficiency of agricultural output, there's no evidence whatsoever that we're going to run out of food.

And you know, a country like Uganda—this is quite interesting—if Uganda, which is a very big country, by the way, if it was utilized properly, it has a water table underneath it and plenty of water. If Uganda was utilized properly, it could feed all of Africa. And so, it's not like we're making full use even of the agricultural capacity that we have available to us. And so there's no—we're not going to overpopulate the world and leave everybody like starving in on Easter Island with nothing but giant heads and no trees. That's not going to happen.

And in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that within 100 years, one of the biggest problems that we'll be facing is a declining population. And that'll be worrisome. I mean, we won't be concerned about that at the moment, but that whole doom and gloom scenario just seems to be wrong. And you know, there are fewer wars than there were by a large margin.

The overall rates of homicidal behavior in the world have plummeted. The rates of death by terrorism over the last 50 years have plummeted. There’s a lot of good news! There’s way more good news than there is bad news. And that's—there's no wars in the Western Hemisphere; there's a piece of good news, you know? That's a remarkable thing.

And you know, it's been 70 years since World War II, and we've had thermonuclear weapons since then. And of course, everyone's terrified of those bloody things, and no wonder. Maybe that's for the best because we maybe needed something to really terrify us, you know? It's certainly possible.

But even though there's always the possibility of a mistake, and there's still the possibility of a nuclear outbreak, we haven't used them, and we haven't had a third world war. And almost all of us here have lived in, what you've got to think, man—comparative peace and prosperity if you compare it to any other time and place anywhere else in the world at any point in history—which is not perfect because, you know, you’re still getting old and you're still gonna die, and we haven't—we haven’t defeated all the diseases that beset us, but God, it could be a lot worse, and we seem to be making it a lot better.

And so, look, this is what happened to me: you know, when I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning, I was looking at something that was really dark. It was really dark. I was interested in totalitarianism, and I'm still interested in totalitarianism. I don't care whether it's on the left or the right; it doesn't matter to me. It's this totalizing view that's predicated on the assumption that you can take a set of a few simple axioms about the way the world is and always was, and then you can decide how society would be structured, and then you can force people into acting that way, and the utopia will come.

I'm not fond of that sort of thinking; I don't think there's any evidence that it's viable, partly because the world's too complicated to manage that, and you just can't get your axioms right. And besides, things shift around on you, and even if you're right today, something's going to turn on you tomorrow, and you're going to have to update your model a bit, and if you don't, well then all hell is going to break loose.

But, you know, I was interested in totalitarianism partly because, for psychological reasons, I was interested in why people were so committed to belief systems that they were willing to put everything to the torch essentially. So mostly I was concerned about the ideological struggle between the Western world and the communist world, particularly the Soviets, but not only the Soviets.

And I was curious in a sort of postmodern way because, you know, you might say, well, you know, the Marxists, they have their viewpoint, and you know, inequality of income distribution is a problem, and maybe things should be fairer, and maybe the fact that there are relatively poor people in the West and relatively rich people in the West is a consequence of oppression, and maybe something could be done about that, and the Western way of looking at the world is just an arbitrary set of rules and the communist way of looking at the world is another arbitrary set of rules.

Maybe you could even say that about the fascist way of looking at the world, although somehow people are much less likely to agree to that, which is quite interesting because it means that by and large, we have come to a collective decision that there are some forms of arbitrary games, let's say, set up on axiomatic structure that are wrong. You know, and it's a very rare person who thinks that what the Nazis did was justifiable, was right in any fundamental sense. And that's interesting, you know, because it means that collectively we have come to a decision that there is a difference between good and evil.

If you assume that what the Nazis did was evil—which I think is a fairly reasonable assumption—I don't know what you would do with the word evil if what happened in places like Auschwitz didn't deserve that epithet. You need some other word that was just as dark to describe what happened, so you might as well just use evil because everybody knows what it means.

So we have come to a conclusion that there are things that we shouldn't get up to, you know? And that also implies that we've come to some conclusion about what constitutes good—some general sense that whatever the opposite of what, let's say, the Nazis did, and I would say also the collectivist communists—whatever the opposite of that is, whatever that might be, that's good and that we should be pursuing that.

And so that's a good thing because it kind of pulls us out of the moral relativistic problem—not exactly, because it's not defined perfectly or anything. You know, to say, well, you shouldn't be a Nazi, it's like, it's kind of vague. You know, okay, no armbands, no goose-stepping.

But then what? Well, that's a complicated question to figure out how to conduct yourself so that you would be unlikely to participate in the horrors of a totalitarian ideological system if the advantages of doing so were offered to you in a realistic way. That's really the moral issue because, you know, if you read about Nazi Germany and you read about communist Soviet Union and China, you understand that those systems were very attractive to people, and there were reasons for that attractiveness.

And had you been there, there's a high probability that you would have been attracted by those ideas. And you can see that now because there's a big resurgence, for example, both on the left and on the right, but I would say primarily on the left, especially in the academic world, there's a big resurgence in the same kind of ideas that inspire generations of Soviet utopians say back in in the early 1900s when they had not so much evidence that what they were doing was absolutely bloody pointless and murderous.

And so that does separate the modern people who suggest that such things from those who believed it 100 years ago, but nonetheless, you know, the point is that those ideas are so attractive that they still resonate with people. And you have to take that seriously because it means they probably resonate with you.

And some of it is—I deal with this to some degree in chapter one, "Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back"—because it really is a discussion of hierarchies, and I actually try to make a case. Like, I like to make a case for hierarchy. You know, the radical leftist types, particularly the postmodernist, and I put this mostly at the feet of people like Foucault—he'd be villain number one, although he was influenced heavily by Marx and his own special sense of resentment, intellectual resentment and arrogance, which made him into a sort of perverted and malevolent and underhanded Marx, which is really something to be, because just the ordinary Marx wasn't so great.

You know, and Foucault makes this fundamental case that human—that there's no real truth and that what passes as truth is the dominant opinion of the dominant group, and by dominant, he means those that hold the power. And so that’s a hell of a pessimistic view of the world, and it’s wrong. It's wrong! And like it's seriously wrong!

And I'm going to lay out why it's wrong. I mean, first of all, it doesn't even work for kids. You know, if you look at how kids organize themselves on the playground, there are bullies. And it's interesting, if you study bullies, you find out that they're not necessarily the most unpopular kids. There are outcast kids who are more unpopular than the bullies. And the bullies are ambivalently popular. They have some friends, and they have some enemies.

So, you know, so it's not entirely counterproductive to be a bully, but it starts working—it starts working less and less well as you get older. And so it's not doing so well by the time you hit junior high, and by the time you're at high school, it's not a very effective strategy at all. And a bully is someone who uses power. It's like, bloody well do what I want, or I'll hit you, or I'll do something else that you won't like that will be physical, or maybe it'll be psychological.

But if the psychology doesn't work—calling you names, demeaning you, you know, talking behind your back—which is a very common form of female bullying because females have their own forms of bullying, and they're very effective. You know, if that doesn't work, then I can just take you out of the schoolyard and pound you. And if I can't pound you myself, well then I'll pound you with one of my friends, and that'll be just as effective, and you'll bloody well do what I want you to do.

And that's power. And it's like really? That's the basis of our society? That's that sort of power? That's how we organize ourselves? I mean, it's patently ridiculous! First of all, most children who are popular—let's say universally popular and who do well socially—aren't bullies. They're good at playing with others, and they learn that between the ages of two and four.

And they learn very straightforward rules, like reciprocity—that's the big one. There are a couple. Reciprocity is one; trust is another—to abide by your word. But those are the same things. Reciprocity and trust are very similar. It's like, well, you know, we'll take turns. You play my game now, and I'll play your game tomorrow.

You know? And you guys have had friends that were real friends, and you know perfectly well that if you have a good friend, you don't have to keep track exactly of what you do for each other. You don't write it down on a piece of paper and, you know, put a check mark beside it unless you're a little bit on the paranoid side, and that's only the beginnings of your problems.

And what you do is you know you kind of keep track of who does what for who, and you kind of keep the balance equal, and you do that because, well, that's what you do if you're awake and conscious and a decent person. And if you have a relationship, if you're in a marriage, it's the same thing. You know, it's like you don't obsessively keep track of who owes what, when, and why.

That's a sign of a degenerating relationship. What you do is, well, you do what you can for your partner, and they do what they can for you, and you're both aware of that, and you assume goodwill. And with any luck, that iterates across time, and it's a sustainable game. It's not bloody power. And you know, there’s nothing more miserable than being in a relationship where the rule is do what the hell I want or suffer the consequences. You know?

And what kind of relationship are you going to get out of that? Even if the person is proud enough to do what you want them to do when you're there enforcing it, they're not going to put their whole heart into it. That's bloody well for sure! They're going to be, if they have any sense at all—and they do—and if they have any spirit at all—and they do—they're going to be undermining what you're forcing them to do all the time.

There's an old Soviet joke: they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work, right? Great! That's a hell of a way to run a society. And that's exactly how that society ran! So all you do with force is engender bitterness and resentment! And if the person that you're exerting force on can't exert the same level of physical force back, it's not like they're not going to take their revenge in other ways.

They're not going to cook you wonderful meals; they're not going to be, what would you call it? Enthusiastic sexual partners, you know? They're going to get their revenge when they can unless you've crushed their spirit completely. And then it serves you right because then you're dragging around behind you someone whose spirit you've crushed completely. And that's a hell of a way to live!

And so, what is this idea that our society is fundamentally predicated on power? You know? And then that's the postmodern claim! We group ourselves into our groups, whatever the hell they happen to be—sex, gender, ethnicity, whatever the flavor of the month is. There's an infinite number of ways we could group ourselves. And then we organize ourselves into power hierarchies, and we dominate each other!

And then all of those groups go to war against one another, and the most dominant group that has the most power wins. It's like, I don't know what the hell planet Foucault grew up on. You know, that might be the definition of like the worst African dictatorship of the last 100 years, but it's not a description of our society, and it’s not a description of the way that people organize themselves into hierarchies—which was the point I was trying to make in rule one when I talked about hierarchies.

Now, it's very important where you are in your hierarchical position with regards to other people in relationship to your mental health, and this is a really important thing to understand. Because you have an ancient counter in your brain, and that was the point of the biological comparisons, and lobsters being one set of comparisons, but not only lobsters. We know perfectly well, animal behaviorists, people who know their neural psychopharmacology, know perfectly well that the serotonin system operates quite similarly across most animals with complex nervous systems.

And one of the things that it does is track relative status position. And in birds—wrens, which is another example I used a lot of—it is power. You know, wren's a little bird. It's quite a cute bird. It sings very nicely. And you think it's harmless, but it's not. It's a vicious little character. And I used to sit in my backyard and record wren's songs on my tape recorder, and the wren that lived in our backyard would dive-bomb it—you know, four inches away.

And it was very brave of him, and he had a little nest that was up in the tree, and there were some nests that we had built, birdhouses in the neighborhoods nearby and then in the yards nearby. And he would go like half—he'd spend half his day stuffing those other birdhouses with sticks so full that no bird could get in them. You know, it was like, this is my damn yard, which is what he was saying when he was singing so beautifully.

And you better look the hell out because if you build, I'm going to stuff your damn house with sticks, and if I see you sitting on a branch, I'm going to dive-bomb you and knock you off. And that's power, and that's what wrens do, despite the fact that they're cute. And chickens do the same thing. There are pecking orders among chickens.

And virtually every animal—wolf packs organize themselves into hierarchies, and chimpanzees organize themselves into hierarchies. And like there are rat hierarchies, and hierarchical organization is the rule among animals that live somewhat socially, and even those who don't, that occupy the same geographical territory. There has to be some way of organizing access to relatively scarce resources that doesn't result in chronic combat, because chronic combat—well, look, you're Wren A, and you're Wren B, and you decide to have it out.

So you peck yourselves half to death, and you're Wren C, and so you got a little bit more patience. You just wait until those two wrens beat each other to death, and then you move in. It's like, it's a stupid solution; it doesn't even work for wrens, let alone people. And so, you know, the wrens announced their prowess, and they do that with the quality of their song and their displays, and they indicate to one another who shouldn't be messed with.

And then there's a minimum of combat. And you could make a pretty good case that that's power—that that's power. But like, it's not like wrens get together and build, like, wren apartment houses and then go out on collective worm hunt—insects, I guess—collective insect hunting expeditions and bring them all back and distribute them or make insect farms so that there's more insects for all the wrens. They haven't got that far, you know?

They're competing in a zero-sum game, and that isn't what human beings do. We figured out how to not have zero-sum games a very, very long time ago. And it turns out that if the game you're playing isn't zero-sum, right—which means that there's only a finite number of resources and everybody has to fight to the death for them, and some are going to get the lion's share and others are going to starve—if you're not playing a zero-sum game, then you can learn to cooperate and compete in an intelligent, civilized manner.

And all of a sudden, there’s more than enough for everyone! Now, still, some people are going to have more than others, you know? But there's nothing—how are you going to stop that? And do you want to? Like, do you want to only know—what do you want? You want to only be allowed to know what everyone else knows? You don't get to know anything that anyone else knows because it's got to be equal? You want everyone to be exactly the same amount of attractive?

You know, which—and if you averaged attractiveness overall and you only allowed each person to be as attractive as the average person, there wouldn't be much attractiveness left in the world. And it seems to me that that would be quite the loss, you know? And strength—you’re not allowed to have any additional strength or ambition or talent or, or let’s say, athletic ability?

Or artistic ability? I mean, aren't we kind of happy that there's massive inequality in the distribution of talent? I know it's harsh and hard, but you can't expect everybody to have every talent that there is. And it would be a 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 whole equality of outcome thing. It isn't—it isn't going to work!

There aren't that many geniuses. You know, we want to exploit the geniuses and get them to work for us! And if the price is that somebody has more than you do of something, well suck it up for Christ's sake! Well, Jesus, seriously, man! It's like, look, how much more do you have than most people have, you know? You need to make thirty thousand dollars a year to be in the top one percent of the socioeconomic distribution worldwide, you know?

You always hear about the one percent, right? The evil one percent, and they churn, by the way, because it's not the same people all the time. It's like, all of you here are in the evil one percent! And you think, well, that's not very fair because I was really only talking about within my country. Well, that's convenient for you, you know? or it makes it a really convenient argument for you.

It's like, well, all those other people—those foreigners—they don't count. If they're poor, who the hell cares? It's the Australians that matter, you know? And so, no, that's a non-starter, you know? And—and by historical standards, you're doing a hell of a lot better than the top one percent, I can tell you that.

I read a nice article by a coalition called Human Progress the other day, and they were comparing the typical middle-class person who lives now with rockefellers in the 1990s. And they'd say, "Well, would you rather be a middle-class person now or Nelson Rockefeller in 1919?" And the answer seemed pretty damn clear that, well, you know, if you were Nelson Rockefeller then, you would have been richer than anyone else.

And there's something to be said for that status, right? Because people do like to have more than others. 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 you’d have that. You'd be richer than everyone else, but there'd be all sorts of things that you have now that Nelson Rockefeller wouldn't have had a hope of purchasing, like the antibiotics that he would have needed to stop his son from dying, for example, you know, just as a start.

And so, I think this complaint about inequality—look, no one likes inequality, exactly! You walk down the street—this is why I always get a kick out of people who protest I'm against poverty. It's like, really?! You're against poverty? And you think that's a unique enough attribute so that it was worth your time to make a sign that said that you were against poverty and show other people?

It's like, I've never met—I've never met anyone that was for poverty. You know, you walk down the street with someone who's pretty well off, you know? And they've got 1920s spats on and a bowler, and they're feeling pretty damn rich, and there's a homeless person there, and they give them a good kick, and they say, "The more poverty, the better!" It's like, no! You know, when people walk down the street and you see homeless people, and they're often—homeless is a complex problem.

Like, you think, well, homeless people are poor? It's like, yeah, yeah, man. That's like one problem they have out of 50! And like I've worked with poor people, you know, in my clinical practice, and poor in multiple dimensions! And many of them—if you gave them money, they were just done! Especially if they were like alcoholics and cocaine addicts.

As long as they were broke, they had some hope of living through the next month. But as soon as their unemployment check showed up, man, they were face down in the ditch three days later, right? Nothing but cocaine and alcohol with all their idiot friends for three days, and then they'd show up back in my practice saying, "You know, God, I relapsed again." Well, what happened? Well, my money came in. It's like, yeah, money's really going to do you a hell of a lot of good; it'll just kill you faster than poverty.

Now, not that there's anything good about poverty, but it's not like these are simple problems. You walk down the street, and you see someone who's been an alcoholic for 20 years, and maybe they're addicted to methamphetamines as well, or maybe they're schizophrenic. It's like, it isn't the unequal distribution of monetary resources that is the primary cause for that problem, and it isn't going to be some sort of straightforward redistribution that's going to fix it because it's way more complicated than that.

And so, and then the whole power thing too! It's like, look, I get it; I get the left-wing, I get the left-wing issue, and I really do. And I think I get it better than the damn left-wingers get it! Because you know, most of the radical types, they follow Marx and they say, "Well, one of Marx's dictums was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people." And that's right— that's true!

Wealth and capital, income for that matter—but not only that—whatever it is that you might like to have accumulates in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of people. It's a principle that was discovered by an economist named Pareto—Vilfredo Pareto. And he pointed out something that had been pointed out in the gospels, by the way, thousands of years earlier, which was to those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away.

The rule being once you start to succeed at something, the probability that you will continue to succeed ever more rapidly increases. So there's an exponential function with regards to success, but there's also an exponential function with regards to failure. Failure and success aren't like this; they're like this—fail, fail, die, succeed, succeed, succeed, ridiculously! It's this weird curve.

And it's funny because it doesn't just characterize economics; it's a really fun—it looks like a really fundamental economic law. I was actually quite shocked when I first learned about this, which was only about 15 years ago, because I thought most things were normally distributed. It turns out that that's not true! What people produce creatively isn't normally distributed. A small proportion of people produce most of what's of value. It doesn't matter what it is.

And you know this; it's like how many books does Stephen King sell? It's like half the books, right? And then there's the next guy after Stephen King, and no one even knows who he is, and he sells like one-tenth as many books as Stephen King. And then there's author number 50 out of the thousands and thousands of authors—and he's barely scraping by, and then there's the bottom 99.9 percent, and they can't make a living writing. And that's how it is.

And it's the same with musicians, and it's the same with athletes. You know, if you look at the number of goals scored, for example, in hockey—I'm Canadian, so I'll use that—there's a small percentage of absolutely phenomenal hockey players, even in something as amazing as the National Hockey League or any professional sports league. You know, you have to be one hell of an athlete to make it in a professional sports league, and still, you get this tiny group of superstars who are way better at it than anyone else.

You know, and so there's this weird rule that as you get more, getting even more gets easier. And who knows why it is exactly? Partly it's practice, but—and it characterizes all sorts of situations like it characterizes the size of planets. A small number of planets have almost all the mass; it characterizes stars the same way; it characterizes biomass in the Amazon jungle; it characterizes city size.

A small percentage of cities have almost all the people. It's like, what's that? And then you go back 10,000 years, you look at a Paleolithic grave site, and you see what people are buried with, and like there's one guy, there's two guys there, there's this covered with gold, right? The grave site is insanely rich, and everyone else has like a bone, and it's theirs, and that's it.

You know, and so you analyze Paleolithic grave sites, you see exactly the same Pareto distribution. A small number of people are buried with all the wealth, and almost everyone else has none. And so it's this unbelievably deep proclivity of resources to distribute themselves unequally. And you know this too because you play games like Monopoly, right? You've all played Monopoly!

What happens when you play Monopoly? You all start out equal, right? Exactly 100 percent equal. And you all have an equal chance of winning because it's basically a game of chance—not entirely, because you can play stupidly—but you can only play so intelligently because you're at the mercy of the dice. And what happens inevitably is that some evil capitalist ends up with all the money and all the 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, there's something fundamentally unfair about that. Or maybe you play non-competitive Monopoly, where after every round you redistribute the money so everyone, right? So there's no fun in that! And so the problem with Karl Marx, as far as I'm concerned, is that he was nowhere pessimistic enough. It's like, no, you can't blame inequality on capitalism. In fact, capitalism is pretty good at ameliorating inequality!

Like, there’s still plenty of inequality in capitalist societies—make no mistake about that. And you can make some claim although it's a tricky one that some indices of inequality have increased over the last 20 years. It depends on how you measure it, because it's complicated. Because you know, even poorer people now have access to, let's say, iPhones, which have more computational power than the entire system that put Apollo 11 on the moon, which is, you know, for six hundred dollars, which isn't a bad bargain!

So it's not that easy! It's not that easy to do those economic calculations. But one of the things you can say about capitalism and about private property and about the idea that people have a right to what they earn and a right to what they own is that it's pretty damn good at generating wealth. And the wealth isn't equally distributed by any stretch of the imagination, but a fair bit of it goes to the bottom, and that's why we're seeing, well, a relative dearth of tremendous deprivation.

And you might say, well, we want to squeeze out that last bit of inequality, and it's like, well, maybe we do and maybe we don't; it's not so obvious. First of all, because even if we did want to, we don't know how. And we certainly do know that there are some ways that if we go about it, then things really go to hell in a hand basket really fast and everyone ends up equal because they're all starving and dead. You end up in a situation like Venezuela—not that they're all starving and dead, but the average Venezuelan lost 17 pounds in the last year, and that wasn't from voluntary diet!

And that's a very rich country. And so we do know that there are ways of ameliorating inequality that just don't work, and so it's a dangerous thing to mess with because we don't understand it. Now, you know, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand it, and that also doesn't mean that the left doesn't have a point. You know, if your society becomes too unequal and too many people stack up at the bottom, and they don't have an opportunity to move forward, that seems like it's bad for everyone!

And so we could agree on that, and we could try to set up our hierarchies so that they're not too brutal for the people who end up at the bottom, right? That would be nice if we could be sensible and figure out how to do that. But I think we're not doing that bad of a job of figuring out how to do it! We build infrastructure that everybody can use; we have universal education systems and so on, and they're not perfect, but they're far from catastrophic, and they're a hell of a lot better than they were a hundred years ago.

So we are making some progress on that. I think the problem with the radical leftists is that they don't take the problem of inequality seriously enough. They blame it on capitalism. It's like, sorry, that's wrong; it's a way deeper problem. It wasn't capitalism that produced inequality of gravesite wealth distribution in Paleolithic Europe 10,000 years ago.

And it's not capitalism that makes some stars have all the mass, right? It's a different order of problem! And so we have to be more sophisticated than economists were 150 years ago when we talk about inequality. And when we talk about hierarchy, we also have to be more sophisticated because we have to start to understand what it means for there to be a human hierarchy, and the basis upon which hierarchies actually establish themselves if they're going to be playable, iterable, civilized, productive, sustainable—what? Voluntary? That's an important one!

What are the characteristics of such things? And I think that if we use a little bit of sense, we can figure that out too. And I like to use the example of plumbers because I actually happen to like plumbers, partly because I don't like it when my basement is full of sewage, and that's happened once or twice. And oh, you call a plumber, and then that doesn't happen, and I'm pleased about that, 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 difference between a good plumber and a bad plumber. I've had two bad plumbers! And the first bad plumber was in Montreal, and my tap was leaking a little bit, and so he came in to fix it, and I don't know what the hell he was doing, but he was using a torch, and he was burning something—maybe taking some solder off some pipes underneath the sink—but he lit the wall on fire, which wasn't helpful because the wall wasn't on fire before he showed up!

And so, and then he forgot to shut the water off at the main pipe when he took the tap apart. And so then, apart from the fact that my wall was charred, my bathroom was completely covered with water. And then he sort of panicked, and he put the thing back together—the tap back together with the washer, which was now extraordinarily damaged—and he shut it off, and he turned—he’d figured out to turn the water off at the main valve by then—and he turned it back on, and he left!

It was like, now the wall was on fire, and the floor was covered with water, and there was five times as much water running out of the tap! This was not an improvement! I joked with my wife that he was an anti-plumber, you know, like an anti-matter plumber! And if he ever met a real plumber on the road and shook his hand, they'd both disappear in a puff of light!

So that was one plumber, and you know, then another plumber—we were redoing our house in Toronto, and it was the day before the drywallers were supposed to come in. And so we were working like mad because drywallers, like they're fun to watch, man—they zip in, they lift up their piece of drywall, they zip it up with their screws, and they're really fast, and it's quite a skilled operation, and but they're really fast, and they don't muck about.

And so you have to be ready for the drywallers. And so this guy had redone all our pipes—PVC plastic pipe—and you put that together with a kind of solvent. So you just put solvent on one end of the pipe, the male end, and you put it into the female end with some solvent, and they stick together—and hopefully it seals.

And he said, "My joints never leak." And so we tested them. We went up on this roof three floors up and filled the pipes up with water, and his joints leaked like 32 joints leaked with four inches of water in the basement. And this was the day before the drywallers were supposed to show up!

And then also we found that he had put a lot of the pipes outside of the wall where the drywall was going to be, which actually also constitutes a mistake, right? Because I don't know about your house, but my house isn't a house where there's plumbing sticking randomly out of the walls! So we had to spend the whole night redoing all the joints and cutting the pipes and, you know, putting them where they were supposed to be.

And so, and so that's a bad plumber. And so we're going to make the case that there are bad plumbers, you know? And they don't know what they're doing, and so they don't have any skill, or maybe they're worse than not skilled—they make things worse! Because that's worse than just not skilled.

And then you could say, well, maybe they lie to you when they deal with you, and maybe they overcharge you, and maybe they don't treat their employees very well. You know, and maybe they're not good to live with at home either; who the hell knows? But they're not good plumbers! And so we're going to say that just in the plumbing domain, which is an important domain, skill matters, right? That seems reasonable.

And then we might say the same thing about, well, what probably matters in law. Like, if you ever need a lawyer, I would recommend that you get a good one, because if you get a bad one, it's going to cost you a lot more than if you get a good one. Like everything. And you know, they're good teachers and not so good teachers, and there are good massage therapists, and there are good nurses, and there are horrible nurses, and there are great surgeons, and then there are surgeons that will definitely kill you!

You know, and you'd want to go to one that won't kill you. That's the—and you'd assume difference in skill, you know? And whatever your occupation is, you know, bloody well maybe you're a short order cook at a diner. And like some short order cooks can whip up a pretty damn decent breakfast in three or four minutes, and you're pretty bloody happy to sit there and eat it, and other short order cooks can produce some god-awful mess of burnt eggs and wretched toast and rancid bacon and orange juice that's like had a crayon dipped in it for the color and with a really ornery waitress and coffee that's been cooking since like 1953.

And there's a—that's a big difference in short order cooks! There's qualitative difference in skill! Okay? And so, one of the things we might point out is that part of the reason that we have hierarchies in the West is because people actually differ in skill, not power! Skill!

Some people are better at whatever it is they're supposed to be doing than other people, and we think that what they're supposed to be doing is important so that it matters that they're better at it. And what are we going to do? We're going to deny that skill plays a role? All the evidence suggests that it does!

Like if you look at what predicts long-term success from a psychological perspective in a given occupation, conscientiousness is the best personality predictor, and conscientious people are dutiful and hardworking and they have integrity, and they do what they say they're going to do, and so that's the best predictor. Second best predictor—and the best predictor—is intelligence.

And so it looks like in a relatively complicated occupation, if you're going to be successful in a Western culture, the best predictors of your success are whether you're intelligent, skilled, and conscientious, and that's pretty good! Like how else would you want it to be? If you're going to set it up?

And it isn't power! Because agreeableness is another dimension—you can be disagreeable! Men are more disagreeable than women, by the way! And if our society was fundamentally based on power, then the most disagreeable people would be the most successful. And they're not! They're the ones that are most likely to be imprisoned! So that evidence just doesn't support that.

And then you know, the other thing is—you don't have—you imagine, well, our society is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy, and everything's based on power. It's like, okay, so you need a plumber, and so what you do is you go out in the street—or maybe you don't; maybe you cower at home, and these like gangs of plumbers come to your house, and they're armed to the damn teeth with their pipes.

And they say, look, I don't know whether you need like some plumbing work done or not, but maybe we'll come in here and break a few things so that you do need it. But even if we're not going to do that, it's like, we're the plumbers that are going to take you out unless you call us. And so the next time the toilet overflows, man, here's the number, and you better put it on your fridge, or there's going to be hell to pay!

Or you know, the same is the case of like gang-affiliated massage therapist. Exactly the same thing! Tattooed to the hilt, right? Armed to the teeth and roaming the streets, making bloody sure that if you have a stiff neck, that the most powerful massage therapist is the one that you're going to call first. You know, it's complete bloody rubbish! It's absolutely not the case!

Now, it is the case that even in a hierarchy that's functional, the thing can go sideways, and it does! You know, you get companies that get too big; they start to get corrupt. People who play politics and who are good at manipulating start to rise up the hierarchy—the structure stops performing its function, its useful function in the way that it should; it starts to degenerate.

But generally then it dies! You know, like the typical Fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years, and the typical family fortune only three generations! It's not that easy to keep a functional enterprise going; you have to be awake. And so, no, it’s not an oppressive patriarchy, our culture—that's wrong! It's based on competence, fundamentally!

Imperfect as that is, it's not like we don't make hiring mistakes; it's not like there aren't people who are foolish and blind and hire and fire based on attributes that have nothing to do with competence! But that's a sign of the deterioration of the system and the corruption of the system and not an indication of its fundamental function!

And it's also the case that—and this is partly what I tried to outline in rule one, which is pretty much the rule we're going to discuss today—part of your goal if you want to take your place in the hierarchy properly is to be a good person. And that was the argument I was trying to make in the chapter—not that you're supposed to be like the most brutal crustacean on the block. You know, it’s so foolish what Kathy Newman, I think, asked me in the UK.

"So you're saying that human society should be organized along the lines of lobsters?" It's like, look lady, if you're going to insult someone, you might want to try accusing them of something of believing something that someone somewhere believed at least once in the entire history of the human race and not that yes—absolutely lobsters for everyone! You know, that's how what I was trying to make the case was that we have this very old system in our nervous systems which is very old, which keeps track of where we are in hierarchies, and that regulates our emotions because of it.

Because it's really important to you and you and you and you if you're not completely bloody psychopathic that you have a place in a social hierarchy and that you're admired and respected and valued by other people. And it's so important that the neurochemical system that keeps track of that regulates your other emotions so that if you're low on the totem pole because, well, for whatever the reason happens to be—sometimes you deserve it, sometimes it's accidental, sometimes you've been hurt—there're lots of ways that this can happen.

Your serotonin levels plummet like a defeated lobster, and then you feel way more negative emotion about everything and way less positive emotion about everything. And that's absolutely dreadful! Like, that’s clinical depression, and it's a terrible, terrible condition.

And so it's absolutely crucial that you maintain a tenable position in a hierarchy and not have one of power, but one of competence! And at least even if you're not in a position that's tenable, you're moving upward toward one that's tenable because that at least gives you hope! You know? Because maybe you're young and useless, and you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just getting started, and so you're low man on the totem pole, but it's not like you're stuck there forever.

You do some decent work—I had some kid tell me the other day; it was really nice. It was just last night; was it a comedy show? I went to here, and a lot of the comedians knew us—Reuben and I went in there, and so a lot of them knew us, which was quite interesting! And one of them said, "God, you know, I was in a rough shape two years ago. I was just getting married—I just got married, and I was nihilistic as hell and depressed and bitter, and things weren't going well for me at all.

And I was unemployed. And one 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 I was kind of dragging my ass to the work and not doing it well, and I listened to one of your lectures. And it said, 'Look, if you haven't got anything going for you but you have a job, don't quit your job, whether you hate it or not. It's like, man, that's what you're hanging on to—the edge of the world with your fingertips, you know? Don't let go! If you can find a better job, okay, fine! But you don't just quit because then what? You're done!'

And he said, 'And another thing that I had mentioned was, why don't you just try to work as hard as you can at your damn job for like six weeks?' Right? All flat out! You know, if you work ten longer hours, you make 40 percent more money! That's something worth thinking about! You know, you've got a job; maybe you show up 15 minutes early, and you leave 15 minutes late! You know, when you actually work, and your boss notices because people would probably notice, and then maybe someone’s going to get promoted, and maybe it'll be you!

Because something's gonna tilt the scales! And that little extra bit of work done without cynicism and resentment might be enough." Well, he said he started at 21 bucks an hour, and in six weeks, he was making 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 more than 21!

He said his life had turned around substantially because he learned if he put some damn effort into it! And I’m not trying to be Joel optimist here. Like, I know that people hit runs of bad luck and that things can take you out of life, right? Unfortunate illnesses, and betrayal—and like there's no shortage of randomness and horror that can wipe you out even if you're doing your best! But you don't have a better bloody plan than to do your best, and it tends to work a lot better than you think!

And what's so interesting about the hierarchies that people set up is that that's how they're set up. They're not set up on power; they're set up on reciprocity and skill and trust—not always, you know? And if you're in a job where you work hard, and you're a good guy, and you're doing your best, and your boss is a bloody tyrant and you never get a break—it’s like okay, fine, you're you're in a Foucault world—get the hell out of it, you know?

You get your resume set up, write your CV, fill in the educational gaps that you have, send out your 25 resumes a day, and prepare to make a lateral move because you're in a bad place! But almost everywhere—and this certainly has been the case virtually everywhere I've worked—and I've had like 50 jobs, you know?

If you go above and beyond the call of duty, you know, and wake an intelligent way interpersonally, socially, with regards to the diligence of your work, with regards to the truth of your attitude and your courage and all of that, that will work! And you know, if you try it for a year and it doesn't work, then go somewhere else because you can! Right? You're free!

I mean, it's not easy—you can't just walk out the door and instantly find another job, but you're not enslaved. You could make a move; you could even decide that you're going to make a move and double your salary! You know, it's not a bad goal, and it's certainly a possibility. It's like, it isn't hierarchy; it's ethics that determines success in a functional society. It's ethics that determines success, not power!

The rest of it's a bloody lie! And that doesn't mean that all our systems are perfectly ethical—you know, you got to be awake! If you're in a system, there's going to be some corruption in it! Part of what you're supposed to do is keep your damn eyes open for the corruption and your mouth speaking truth, so when the corruption starts to take root, you object to it! So the whole damn system doesn't turn into a pathological power play, and that's part of your ethical responsibility as a conscious being, an ethical being, a religious being for that matter and a citizen, you know?

And you're charged with that! That's why you're—that's why you vote! That's why you're the cornerstone of your state, man! You're the—you're the—what would you call—you're the wellspring of the ethical actions that replenish the dying world! That's what you are! And if you act—that's really—that's what you are! And if you act that out properly, then things work, and that's why that's always been described as ethical behavior!

It's not because you're supposed to be good, you know? And being good isn't that easy, anyway! And it certainly doesn't mean being nice and harmless! It's not an easy thing to be good; you have to be tough as a damn boot to be good, because you have to stand your ground when you need to stand your ground, and you have 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 plan strategically so that when you're going to say no, you can mean it and it will stick! You know, and that takes a certain amount of— that takes a certain amount of integrated malevolence, I would say! And once it's integrated, it's not malevolence; it's strength! It's strength of character! It's the ability to stand your ground, and you have to cultivate that! And you cultivate that, at least in part, by telling the truth!

And so you take your place in the world as a decent person and as a decent citizen, and then—and you play the hierarchical game properly, and that is to stand up straight with your shoulders back. It's like the world's an onslaught! You've got the tyranny of culture to deal with; you've got the catastrophe of nature; you've got your own damn malevolence and ignorance, right, all coming at you! Plus the incredible complicated indeterminate potential of the future—that's all coming at you, and it's all your responsibility!

And you can cringe away from it and be afraid of it and be victimized by it and be bitter and cynical about it, and no wonder because it can be painful, or you can turn around and you can say, man, bring it on! Because there's more to me than there is to the catastrophe! And this is what I discovered from looking at what I looked at. I looked at the darkest things I could look at—really, for 30 years, I was really a lot of fun to be around.

I looked at the darkest things that I could think of, right? Not only what happened in Auschwitz and what happened in the gulag, but personal issues. You know