QUOTES:

I do believe it may be the case that more people—many people—are intimidated by books for all sorts of reasons. Highly literate reading is a relatively rare skill; it's not overwhelmingly rare, but relatively rare. However, listening—people can listen. All of a sudden, this complicated information is available to people who can listen, and maybe that's 10 times as many people as those likely to read, or maybe it's 50 times as many. So, God only knows what the consequence of that will be. That could be a real education revolution, and hopefully, we'll be smart enough to take advantage of it.

When I step into an old-school television studio, it feels like 1975. The person I'm talking to isn't really there; they're a speaking device for the corporation. And they have to be because the corporation, running high-expense, low-bandwidth television—where every minute or second is extraordinarily expensive—can't take risks. They can't have free-flowing conversations on the off chance that something goes dreadfully wrong, and it might. So, everything is scripted, and you have 30 seconds to make your point. But some things you can't say in 30 seconds; you have to compress them to the point where they're actually foolish. But what else do you have? Whereas with long-form conversations, like podcasts, you can actually have a discussion and try to get to the bottom of it. That’s pretty cool, and it turns out that people will actually follow along. It could 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 into a very short period of time.

From 2000 to 2012, we decreased the absolute level of abject poverty in the world by 50%. It was the fastest, most spectacular economic miracle in human history, yet you hardly ever hear about it.

I'm not in favor of the idea that there's something wrong with humanity, that we’re a scourge on the planet, and that it would be better off if there were fewer of us or none of us. I think there's something unbelievably dangerous about that attitude.

The more you know about human history, the more you realize there are endless details you have no idea about. But if you do a reasonable overview, you see it's a bloody mess—privation, war, catastrophe, brutality, struggle, strife, and difficulty all the way through. People striving against astronomical odds, and yet succeeding. Overall, the story is one of decent progress—not unbroken progress—but it's better now than it's ever been by a huge margin, and there's every bit of evidence to suggest it could continue to get better and better.

There's an unbelievable collection of smart people out there, working on things like mad—and it's working. You see someone like Elon Musk, and you wonder, what the hell do you make of someone like that? He made an electric car, which was basically impossible—and it works, which was basically impossible. Then he built the infrastructure so you could charge it wherever you drove—that was basically impossible. Then he made it cheap because, if you factor in the price of gas, the electric car is about as expensive as the gasoline car. That was unbelievable. Then he built a rocket that was one-tenth the price of a NASA rocket, that you could reuse, which was impossible. Then he put one of his cars on top of the rocket, shot it into space, and this all happened while he’s still alive. And then he blew it all by smoking pot on Joe Rogan, which is pretty funny.

Remember the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Two years later, there were more fish there than before the spill. You know why? Because people stopped fishing. It turned out the pollution was actually good for the fish. That’s why you have to do your research carefully.

Almost all of us here have lived in comparative peace and prosperity when you compare it to any other time and place, anywhere in the world, at any point in history.

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 predicated on the assumption that you can take a few simple axioms about the way the world is and always has been, and then decide how society should be structured. Then, you force people to act that way, and utopia will come. I'm not fond of that thinking. I don't think there's any evidence it's viable, partly because the world is too complicated to manage that. You can't get your axioms right, and things shift on you. Even if you're right today, something will change tomorrow, and you'll have to update your model. If you don’t, then all hell is going to break loose.

Most children who are universally popular and do well socially aren't bullies—they're good at playing with others. They learn that between the ages of two and four, along with straightforward rules like reciprocity. That's the big one, along with trust, which is very similar. It's like, "We'll take turns—you play my game now, and I'll play yours tomorrow." You've had friends who were real friends, and you know that if you have a good friend, you don't have to keep exact track of what you do for each other. You don't write it down or put a checkmark beside it unless you're a little paranoid, and that’s just the beginning of your problems. What you do is keep a general sense of who does what, and you try to keep the balance equal. You do this because that's what decent, conscious people do. If you're in a relationship, like a marriage, it's the same—you don't obsessively keep track of who owes what and when. That's a sign of a deteriorating relationship. Instead, you do what you can for your partner, and they do the same for you. You assume goodwill, and with any luck, this iterates across time, creating a sustainable relationship. It's not about power. There's nothing more miserable than being in a relationship where the rule is, "Do what I want or suffer the consequences." What kind of relationship are you going to get out of that?

There's an old Soviet joke: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." That's a hell of a way to run a society.

Animal behaviorists and those who study psychopharmacology know perfectly well that the serotonergic system operates similarly across most animals with complex nervous systems. One thing it does is track relative status positions. Wolf packs organize into hierarchies, chimpanzees organize into hierarchies, and even rats have hierarchies. Hierarchical organization is the rule among social animals, and even those that aren't social but occupy the same geographical territory. There has to be a way of organizing access to relatively scarce resources that doesn't result in constant combat.

You need to make $30,000 a year to be in the top 1% of the socioeconomic distribution worldwide.

I've worked with poor people in my clinical practice—poor in multiple dimensions. Many of them, if you gave them money, would be worse off, especially if they were alcoholics or 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, they'd be face down in a ditch three days later—nothing but cocaine and alcohol with all their idiot friends. Then they'd come back to my practice saying, "God, I relapsed again." What happened? "My money came in." Yeah, money's really going to help; it'll just kill you faster than poverty.

Even poorer people now have access to things like iPhones, which have more computational power than the entire system that put Apollo 11 on the moon.

If you ever need a lawyer, I'd recommend getting a good one, because a bad one will cost you more in the long run. It's the same with everything—there are good teachers and not-so-good teachers, good massage therapists, good nurses, horrible nurses, great surgeons, and surgeons who will definitely kill you. You want the one who won’t kill you. You’d assume there's a difference in skill, and whatever your occupation, you know that well. Maybe you're a short-order cook at a diner. Some short-order cooks can whip up a decent breakfast in three or four minutes, and you're happy to eat it. Other short-order cooks can produce a god-awful mess of burnt eggs, wretched toast, rancid bacon, and orange juice that's been colored with a crayon. And maybe you're served by a really ornery waitress with coffee that's been cooking since 1953. There’s a big qualitative difference in short-order cooks. One point to make is that part of the reason we have hierarchies in the West is that people differ in skill—not power, but skill. Some people are better at what they do, and we think what they're doing is important, so it matters that they're better at it.

If you want to take your place in the hierarchy properly, it's about being a good person.

We have a very old system in our nervous systems that keeps track of where we are in hierarchies, and it regulates our emotions. It's important to you, me, and everyone—unless you're completely psychopathic—that you have a place in a social hierarchy, that you're admired, respected, and valued by others. It’s so important that the neurochemical system keeping track of that regulates your other emotions.

It's absolutely crucial that you maintain a tenable position in a hierarchy, not one of power, but one of competence. And at least, even if you're not in a tenable position, you're moving upward toward one, because that at least gives you hope.

Why don't you try working as hard as you can at your job for six weeks, right? All out. If you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money. That's worth thinking about. You've got a job, maybe show up 15 minutes early and leave 15 minutes late, and actually work. Your boss will notice because people probably notice, and maybe someone will get promoted—maybe it'll be you. Something will tilt the scales, and that little extra work done without cynicism and resentment might be enough. If you go above and beyond the call of duty, in an intelligent way—interpersonally, socially, with regards to the diligence of your work, the truth of your attitude, and your courage—that will work. And if you try it for a year and it doesn't work, then go somewhere else.

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 eyes open for the corruption and speak the truth. When corruption starts to take root, you object to it so the whole system doesn't turn into a pathological power play. That's part of your ethical responsibility as a conscious, ethical, religious being, and as a citizen. You're charged with that. That's why you vote. That's why you're the cornerstone of your state—you're the wellspring of the ethical actions that replenish the dying world.

Being good isn't easy, and it certainly doesn't mean being nice and harmless. It's not easy to be good. You have to be tough as a boot to be good because you have to stand your ground when necessary, and you have to be able to say no when it's time to say no.

The world is an onslaught—you've got the tyranny of culture to deal with, the catastrophe of nature, your own malevolence and ignorance, all coming at you. Plus the incredibly complicated, indeterminate potential of the future—all your responsibility. You can cringe away from it, be afraid, victimized, bitter, and cynical. No wonder, because it can be painful. Or you can turn around and say, "Bring it on," because there's more to you than there is to the catastrophe. There's more to us than there is to the horror. Nature is bent on our destruction. As bad as culture is—tyrannical and bloody, as far back as you can look—as malevolent as you are in the darkest part of your heart (and that's plenty malevolent), the possibility within you that can well up the courage, truth, ability, skill, and willingness to set things right, if you are willing to set them right, is more powerful than all of that.

What you most want to be found will be found where you least want to look, essentially. And it's so interesting because it means that if you're willing to turn around, stand up straight, and fully face the darkness, what you discover in the darkest part is the brightest light. Isn't that something worth discovering? There will be terrible darkness in your life, and it can make you cynical and bitter. It could easily be that you're just not looking at it enough. Because if you looked at it enough, didn't shy away, and brought everything you had to bear on it, you'd find there is more to you than there is to the horror.

Most of the time you're not bringing your A-game to the table with all that cynicism, bitterness, resentment, willful blindness, and avoidance. Maybe you're playing at 60 percent—it's not good enough because there's too much bad for 60 percent to be good enough. You need 90, 95, or 100 percent.

About 15 or 20 years ago, my mother-in-law developed prefrontal temporal dementia, which I wouldn't recommend. It's one of those degenerative neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, and those things are in the top echelon of awful. You watch a person deteriorate before your eyes—it’s a lengthy death. It was slow, and her husband, who lived in the little town I grew up in, was quite a character. Everyone knew him. I bought him a Foghorn Leghorn t-shirt once because that’s kind of what he was like—loud and bombastic—but he stood up straight, I can tell you. He played the fool a little, mostly for people's amusement, but he was no fool. I always admired and liked him, and thankfully, the feeling was mutual since I married his daughter. He drank a lot with his crazy friends up in northern Alberta, and he wasn’t home much because he worked a lot. He was kind of a party animal around town, but also a good businessman and a good man. Then his wife got sick, and they moved to another town. He took care of her for 15 years, as she deteriorated. Her love for him never went away, even as she lost herself almost completely. She would always light up when he came into the room. He cared for her right up until weeks before her death. He had to finally put her in a care home because he could no longer lift her from the chair. We interacted with him a lot, trying to help him cope. We put up electronic signs in the house to tell her when he was leaving, and recordings in the bathroom to guide her. We did everything we could to make this atrocious experience a little less hellish, and he participated the whole way. It was really something to see and left me with tremendous admiration for him, and not just for him, but for people who can do that. If there was a new decline, he took it on without complaint and did what he could. It was no picnic, but it wasn’t hell either. We were all gathered around my mother-in-law’s deathbed. The family got along pretty well. Her sister is a palliative care nurse, and the other is a pharmacist, so they weren’t particularly afraid of illness and death. They made sure their mother’s lips were wet while she was no longer eating or drinking and tried to make her comfortable. It wasn’t a family feud at mother’s deathbed, which was kind of nice. And she died, but it wasn’t just that. The family coped with it well, nobly, and honorably. It brought them closer together, and they had more respect for their father. In the care home, he met another woman whose husband had Alzheimer’s. They got to know each other, and after both their spouses passed, they started a relationship and now live together. He gained something—it wasn’t that he replaced what he lost, because he still has pictures of his wife up in his house. She was the love of his life, and that’s not going away. But his family respected him more, and everyone pulled together. It wasn’t hell—it was tragedy, but the family pulled together. That was a good example of how you can extract some light from what’s dark.

Drop what you're doing that’s foolish, that you know is foolish, and pick an aim that’s worthwhile, to make things better for yourself, like you're worth taking care of, like you're worth something. Surround yourself with people who believe the same, who rejoice in your accomplishments and are unhappy when you fail. Compare yourself to your accomplishments of yesterday, not to someone else’s today, so you’re not jealous and bitter. Put your own house in order, so you're not cursing the world when some of its disarray might be your fault. Pursue something meaningful, do your best to tell the truth, and see what happens.

Who the hell are you? You think you’re a miracle of some bizarre sort. We’ve been around for three and a half billion years. Every single one of your relatives propagated successfully, and here you are, against all odds, in this world of hell, bitterness, tyranny, and malevolence. Yet God only knows what’s inside you—the capacity for consciousness, to confront potential and turn it into something good. That’s us, man—that’s the Western story. That’s the individual as the cornerstone of the state. It really is who we are, and we need to know that, remember it, and act it out.

Knowing the stories doesn’t make you the archetype.

People wonder about the meaning of life—what’s it all about, what justifies the suffering and misery? That’s what justifies it. You put yourself up against it and think, "With all this pushing against me, how much can I push back? Could I move the horror an inch back with all the strength I have?" And the answer is yes. It makes you better with regards to yourself, and it also makes the world a better place.

Solzhenitsyn said the world is constituted so that each person is a center of the world. This is one of the fundamental axioms of Western civilization.

From being a serious clinical psychologist, I’ve learned that if I walk into a room and there’s trouble, I’m not going to pretend the trouble isn’t there. I won’t do that—I’ll point it out. That often makes me annoying, but I can’t stand it when I see trouble and everyone pretends there isn’t. There’s an elephant under the carpet, and everyone is shifting in their chairs as the elephant moves, all smiling stupidly as if everything’s okay. I’m not doing that. I’m going to point it out, and I don’t like it, because it’s usually not an elephant—it’s some god-awful monster that’s been there for a long time, and no one wants to admit its existence.

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