https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PPVHFyd7nGo
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. So failure and success aren’t like this. They’re like this. Fail, fail, die. Succeed, succeed, succeed ridiculously. Like 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, and out of thousands and thousands of offers, 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 number of goals scored, for example, in hockey, I’m a 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. 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, it’s covered with gold, right? The grave site is insanely rich. 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 preto 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. You’ve all played Monopoly. What happens when you play Monopoly? You all start out equal, right? Exactly 100% 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. Because it depends on how you measure it, because it’s complicated. Because, you know, even poor people now have access to, well, let’s say iPhones, which have more computational power than the entire system that put the Apollo 11 on the moon, which is, you know, for $600, which isn’t a bad bargain. So 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. But 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 if there are some ways that if we go about it, then things really go to hell in a handbasket 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, right? 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 a job of figuring out how to do it. We build infrastructure that everybody can use, we have the 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 100 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, 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 you call a plumber and then that doesn’t happen, and I’m pleased about that, like I’m sure most of you are, 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 had figured out to turn the water off at the main valve by then, and he turned it back on and he left, and 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, 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 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, 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 at it, and it’s quite a skilled operation, 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, the 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, we had 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, because I don’t know about your house, but my 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 putting them the way they were supposed to, and so that’s a bad plumber, and so we’re going to make the case that they’re bad plumbers, 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 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, 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, there are 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, and you want to go to one that won’t kill you, and you’d assume difference in skill, and whatever you do, and 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 colour, and with a really ornery waitress, and coffee that’s like a little bit of a waitress and coffee that’s been cooking since like 1953, and 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 is 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 in prison, 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 therapists, exactly the same thing, tattooed to the hill, 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.