0:04 It's 2016. Uber has spread globally at
0:06 an unprecedented rate and broken every
0:08 rule along the way. The company has been
0:10 illegally surveilling drivers and
0:12 customers for years. They've violated
0:14 local laws in dozens of countries and
0:16 municipalities. They've stolen trade
0:18 secrets and IP from competitors and at
0:20 the time are secretly following
0:22 journalists who have been critical of
0:24 the company in an effort to blackmail
0:26 them. At the center of the storm is
0:28 Travis Kalanick, a brazen but brilliant
0:31 CEO and founder who has, despite the
0:33 mounting pressure, remained relatively
0:35 unscathed. But another year passes and
0:37 the wheels come off. Pun totally intended.
0:38 intended.
0:41 >> Stole about 14,000 confidential files.
0:43 >> Google sues Uber for stealing their
0:44 trade secrets. The New York Times
0:46 reports that Uber knowingly misled
0:48 regulators about their technology.
0:50 Female employees start filing sexual
0:52 harassment lawsuits. A video leaks of
0:55 Kalanick berating an Uber driver.
0:57 >> Kalanick is out entirely, at least as
0:59 CEO of Uber, reportedly under pressure.
1:02 >> Kalanic is finally pushed out and forced
1:04 to resign a few months later. Everything
1:11 Or was it? Nah, let's be serious.
1:13 Nothing was lost. Kalanick walked away
1:15 with a sweet ass $3 billion comp
1:17 package, got plenty of funding for his
1:19 other companies, and is now kicking back
1:21 in his $43 million Beverly Hills
1:23 mansion, counting his money and laughing
1:25 about it. You look around and you see
1:27 this in the world time after time. The
1:29 liar, the narcissist, the bully. They're
1:33 not just surviving, they're thriving.
1:34 They're on the covers of magazines,
1:36 running billion-dollar companies, and
1:38 racking up followers and influence. And
1:40 meanwhile, the honest, kind, decent
1:45 people, burned out, broke, invisible. If
1:47 that feels backwards to you, well, it's
1:49 because it kind of is. And it's not
1:51 random either. In fact, there's a brutal
1:53 logic to why the worst people often win
1:56 in life. And in this video, we're going
1:59 to get into why. But first, a quick word
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3:12 the time we're young, we're taught that
3:14 the world rewards virtue, being kind,
3:16 playing fair, helping others. And in
3:18 early life, that mostly holds up. But
3:20 that's only because the world we start
3:21 in is small. When your environment is
3:24 limited to family, classmates, close
3:27 friends, altruism actually works.
3:28 Meaning that when you share and you help
3:30 others and you're being considerate,
3:32 you're not only showing good manners,
3:33 you're practicing a strategy that is
3:35 nurturing your development. In this way,
3:37 your reputation is built on your
3:39 character. You learn that doing good
3:41 often leads to getting good back. And
3:44 for a while, that is true. But then
3:46 things start to scale up. As we become
3:48 adults, we move into larger systems.
3:51 Corporations, governments, [ __ ] Tik
3:53 Tok, and we realize that the old rules
3:55 start to break down. The feedback loops
3:58 that once rewarded virtue become
4:00 distorted or lost. You see, our moral
4:02 instincts were designed for small groups
4:04 where harm was immediate, visible, and
4:06 personal. But when you scale things up,
4:08 when you add distance, complexity, and
4:10 layers of abstraction, those instincts
4:13 start to fail. Imagine seeing a child in
4:15 front of you being forced into slave
4:17 labor. You'd probably feel immediate
4:19 outrage and try to do something. But now
4:22 imagine that same child hidden behind
4:24 global supply chains, company logos, and
4:27 a sleek online storefront. Oh, and also
4:29 5,000 mi away. And your attention is not
4:32 on exploitation anymore. Instead, it's
4:34 on the shiny new product that's 10% off.
4:36 Human attention is limited, and we can
4:38 only focus on a few things at a time.
4:40 usually things that we can see or people
4:42 that we can talk to. So when confronted
4:44 with global complexity, our minds lose
4:46 track of everything. We check out
4:47 mentally. It's too hard to think about
4:49 the child labor in Africa or the actions
4:51 of the Russian government. You just want
4:53 to buy a [ __ ] watch. This is how
4:55 moral clarity gets diluted. Emotional
4:57 feedback, which usually helps us sense
4:59 what's right from wrong, gets lost in
5:01 the infinite complexity of our modern
5:03 systems. As a result, our natural
5:06 ethical signals become very faint. And
5:08 when they do come through, our attention
5:10 shifts not towards what's most right or
5:12 wrong, but towards what's loudest and
5:14 most visible. This is why the moral
5:15 outrages of the day are usually
5:17 completely detached from reality. More
5:19 people die of coal pollution each year
5:21 than all of nuclear power accidents
5:23 combined across human history. Yet,
5:25 environmentalists are protesting nuclear
5:27 reactors and not the coal plants. This
5:29 is the brutal truth. In these large
5:31 scale systems, people only care about
5:33 what is the loudest and commands the
5:35 most attention. And by constantly being
5:37 distracted by what is loud, we open the
5:39 door for those who are extremely good at
5:41 manipulating attention and taking
5:43 advantage of inattention. The
5:45 egoomaniacs, the narcissists, and the tyrants.
5:51 In the early 1500s, Nicolo Makavelli
5:53 lived in a world steeped in corruption
5:56 and political upheaval. Unlike today,
5:58 Renaissance Italy didn't have the glossy
6:00 corporate veneer of an HR department or
6:03 DEI codes of conduct. It had poisonings,
6:06 public executions, secret alliances, and
6:09 political backstabbing. No, like like
6:12 actual [ __ ] backstabbing.
6:14 But despite the dangerous conditions he
6:16 lived in, he wasn't just some armchair
6:18 philosopher scribbling in isolation.
6:20 Mchaveli was deep in the trenches,
6:23 advising princes and kings. For over a
6:25 decade, he served as a senior diplomat
6:27 and adviser to the Florentine Republic,
6:29 negotiating with popes, kings,
6:31 mercenaries, basically anyone who held
6:33 the reigns of power. And through it all,
6:36 he saw how the game was actually played.
6:38 Power, he realized, didn't reward
6:41 virtue. It rewarded instinct, survival,
6:43 and cunning. Power didn't favor the best
6:45 or most morally upright men. It favored
6:48 the last one standing, usually over
6:50 someone else's dead body. And so from
6:52 this brutal landscape, Mchaveli offered
6:54 a conclusion that still makes people
6:56 squirm. It is better to be feared than
6:59 loved if you cannot be both. Mchaveli
7:01 pointed out something everyone saw but
7:03 didn't really want to see. The higher
7:05 you climbed in the rungs of power, the
7:08 more amoral you had to become. And the
7:10 same traits that harm you locally can
7:14 potentially reward you globally.
7:15 Of course, nobody liked hearing this, so
7:17 they killed Mchaveli and tortured him
7:19 until he gave up names. No, just
7:20 kidding. He actually had a stomach
7:24 virus. Anyway, as Nichzche later put it,
7:26 terribleness is part of greatness. Let
7:28 us not deceive ourselves. So, I'd like
7:29 to take a moment and discuss some of
7:30 these traits that make you a horrible
7:32 person to your friends and family, but
7:34 actually might make you a billionaire or
7:35 prime minister if you play your cards
7:38 right. In psychology, they've identified
7:40 three of these strategic personalities.
7:42 Together, they are called the dark triad.
7:44 triad.
7:47 Mchavelianism is about strategic control
7:49 or the willingness to manipulate people
7:52 and [ __ ] with their heads. People high
7:54 in mchavelianism are willing to lie,
7:56 cheat or steal if they believe that they
7:57 can get away with it. They will mislead
7:59 you, create drama to benefit themselves,
8:01 turn you against the people you care
8:04 about, divide and conquer. Narcissism,
8:05 by contrast, is fueled by
8:07 self-importance and the hunger for
8:09 recognition. The narcissist is
8:11 self-obsessed and deluded in their own
8:13 high self-regard. They believe that not
8:15 only is everything about them, but
8:16 everything should be about them because
8:18 I mean, look how [ __ ] awesome they
8:22 are. And finally, psychopathy is perhaps
8:24 the most famous and the worst of the
8:26 dark triad. It's marked by complete
8:28 emotional detachment, a lack of empathy,
8:31 and a really conspicuous boldness under
8:33 pressure. Psychopaths don't really feel
8:36 fear the same way they don't feel love.
8:38 And they acrue the costs and benefits
8:39 that come with both of those. In a
8:41 brutal and competitive environment, this
8:44 can look like clarity and focus, even
8:46 strength. I mean, think about Steve
8:48 Jobs. He wasn't a psychopath in a
8:49 clinical sense, but he was certainly
8:50 somebody who embodied a lot of
8:53 psychopathic traits in business. He
8:54 fired people for saying the wrong thing
8:57 in a meeting. He exploded at employees
8:59 for even the most minor of mistakes. He
9:01 ridiculed other people's ideas
9:04 regularly. I already fired you. Why are
9:07 you still here? A former Apple employee
9:09 once recalled, "He didn't want to just
9:12 win. He wanted to crush you, and then he
9:14 acted like it was your fault." Each of
9:16 these traits reflects a distinct
9:18 psychological strategy, a way of
9:20 navigating systems that are too vast,
9:22 too impersonal, and too competitive for
9:24 old school virtue to consistently
9:27 succeed. And no, they aren't exactly
9:28 healthy or moral, but in certain
9:29 environments, they can be very
9:31 effective. But let's start with the bad
9:34 news. People high in these traits are in
9:36 fact over represented in positions of
9:39 power as CEOs, politicians, and major
9:41 media figures
9:42 made to react.
9:44 >> But here's the good news. They are also
9:47 over represented in prisons because
9:49 that's basically the deal. These are the
9:51 high-risk, highreward personality
9:53 traits. They help you thrive in a large,
9:55 complex system, but they don't pan out
9:57 well in stable ones, ones that require
9:59 cooperation, trust, or long-term
10:01 emotional support. In other words, what
10:03 may help you win in the jungle is what
10:06 gets you exiled from the village. This
10:08 is another flaw of our perception. Sure,
10:10 we notice the narcissistic CEO or the
10:13 egoomaniacal celebrity, not because
10:15 they're common, but because their rise
10:18 is loud, public, and cinematic. What we
10:20 don't see are the thousands and
10:21 thousands of people with the same
10:24 arrogance, the same disregard for social
10:26 norms who crash and burn without anyone
10:28 noticing. Most narcissists don't become
10:31 icons. They get fired and dumped. Most
10:34 machavelians don't outplay the game.
10:36 They get caught and banned from coming
10:38 back. Most psychopaths don't build
10:40 empires. They wreck their own lives and
10:42 the lives of those around them. Our bias
10:44 makes it so that the failure doesn't
10:46 trend, only the successes. And that's
10:47 how our minds get tricked. By
10:50 overvaluing the few visible winners, we
10:51 start to believe that these traits work
10:53 more often than they actually do. That
10:56 said, even among the few who do seem to
10:58 win by wielding their dark triad traits,
11:00 much of the truth is still hidden. They
11:02 rise through manipulation, ego, and
11:04 ruthlessness. Yet, I would argue that
11:07 these people aren't really winning. Why?
11:09 Because behind closed doors, they are
11:11 very likely miserable, lonely sacks of
11:14 [ __ ] who [ __ ] hate themselves and are
11:16 this close to sticking their head in a
11:19 plastic bag or sucking on a tailpipe in
11:21 their seven Bugatti garage. But don't
11:23 take my word for it because we actually
11:26 have research on this.
11:28 Elizabeth Holmes was too good to be
11:31 true. A supposed Stanford prodigy who
11:33 dropped out to start a revolutionary
11:35 biotech company. She convinced her own
11:37 business professor to become her first
11:39 investor. At long last, she was the
11:42 female Vunder of Silicon Valley that
11:44 they had been waiting for. A brilliant,
11:45 confident, visionary woman who could
11:48 finally redefine what a startup CEO and
11:50 billionaire would look like. Her product
11:52 was also too good to be true. It
11:54 promised things that were literally
11:56 scientifically impossible. But Holmes
11:59 didn't care. She faked the test cases at
12:00 pitch meetings. She lied about the
12:03 results. And she just forced her
12:05 narrative down everybody's throats. And
12:08 what happened? Well, investors lined up.
12:10 The media swooned. Former presidents
12:12 joined the board. Basically, everything
12:15 held up until it didn't. After 12 years,
12:17 the lie finally got out. A public
12:19 journalist exposed in 2015 that Holmes
12:22 and her company were in fact too good to
12:23 be true. Now, what Holmes' story shows
12:25 us along with Kalanics is that success
12:28 built on a dark triad personality is
12:29 never stable. When you treat people like
12:32 tools or threats or just dirt, you don't
12:35 build character, you build blind spots.
12:37 In Hol's case, it was delusions of
12:39 grandeur. This is because when your
12:40 identity is tied to achievement, there's
12:42 no moral compass. Instead, your life's
12:44 navigation system is solely driven by
12:47 metrics and output. And over time that
12:49 corrods you. This brings us to an
12:50 uncomfortable truth. What gets
12:52 sacrificed on the road to success at all
12:54 costs isn't just trust, connection, or
12:56 reputation. It's guilt. And that's where
12:59 the real unraveling begins. Because
13:00 here's the thing most dark triad
13:02 personalities never realize. It's that
13:04 chasing success without integrity
13:06 doesn't just damage others, it damages
13:08 themselves. And not by making them feel
13:10 guilt, but rather by making them
13:12 incapable of feeling guilt at all. Now,
13:14 you might think a life without guilt
13:16 would actually be pretty awesome, maybe
13:19 even an advantage, but it's not.
13:21 Psychologist Steve Stewart Williams says
13:23 that guilt may have started as a simple
13:25 prompt to repay social debts, but it's
13:27 evolved to do much more. It's our
13:29 internal alarm system, warning us that
13:31 we're on the edge of self-destruction.
13:33 And so, this tells us why the dark triad
13:35 personalities are the truly dangerous
13:37 ones. It's because they are those who
13:38 train themselves not to feel guilt.
13:40 There's no feedback loop. There's no
13:41 learning that happens from their
13:43 mistakes because they never feel that
13:44 they did something wrong. They never
13:46 have to correct their actions in the
13:48 future. Instead, they shut those
13:50 feelings off. And sure, for a while that
13:52 might work. It might give them some
13:54 confidence, some boldness, an ability to
13:56 move forward without flinching. But when
13:58 they finally do get caught, guilt comes
13:59 crashing back. And it doesn't come
14:02 alone. It comes with backup like shame,
14:05 fear, and regret. So yes, you can
14:08 succeed without integrity and listening
14:10 to your guilt, but you will eventually
14:12 pay for it. And history and mythology
14:13 are replete with examples of these sorts
14:16 of cautionary tales. From Edipus Rex,
14:18 the Citizen Cain, the [ __ ] Hitler,
14:20 they show that winning the global game
14:22 of power often means forfeiting the
14:24 local game of any connection or meeting.
14:27 But there is good news. You can still
14:28 win without being a sociopathic
14:31 narcissistic [ __ ] boy. And it's actually
14:34 not not that hard to figure out how.
14:36 At the start of the video, I talked
14:38 about how rigged the system can feel.
14:41 How the worst people seem to rise while
14:42 good people get ignored. And I also
14:44 mentioned a reframe that could help.
14:46 It's understanding and accepting that
14:49 morality is a localized strategy. It
14:51 evolved to work in small personal
14:53 networks. So naturally, when the system
14:55 grows too big or too impersonal, our
14:57 moral instincts can start to misfire.
14:59 But that doesn't mean we throw these
15:01 instincts out entirely. It means that we
15:03 adapt. We get smarter about how and when
15:05 to use our virtues. So the real
15:07 challenge here isn't becoming like the
15:09 worst people. It's learning what they
15:11 get right about power and visibility
15:14 without sacrificing your integrity and
15:22 Point number one, empathize less. This
15:25 sounds cold, but stay with me. Empathy,
15:27 like morality, evolved as a local tool.
15:29 It's designed to be narrow and
15:30 immediate, meaning you can only truly
15:33 empathize with one person at a time. And
15:35 that makes sense in a tribal life. You
15:36 needed to feel what your group felt to
15:38 react to the same threats to signal
15:41 loyalty to your friends and family. But
15:43 empathy also has a downside. It narrows
15:46 your field of vision. In contrast, think
15:47 of how it feels when you confide in a
15:49 friend about being hurt and instead of
15:51 validating your pain, instead of
15:53 empathizing, they start defending the
15:55 person who wronged you. It stings and
15:57 you feel betrayed. But ironically, that
15:59 kind of perspective taking is exactly
16:01 what we need in a large scale system.
16:03 What we need isn't more emotional
16:06 immediiacy. It's more compassion. Unlike
16:08 empathy, compassion is broader. It lets
16:10 you hold multiple perspectives at the
16:11 same time. It shifts you out of raw
16:14 emotion and into a rational discernment.
16:15 exactly where you need to be when
16:18 navigating complex social systems where
16:19 the stakes are high and the
16:21 relationships are not always personal.
16:23 Say a colleague is struggling. Empathy
16:24 might have you drop everything to help
16:27 them, to feel what they feel, to fix it.
16:29 But compassion lets you pause. It gives
16:31 you time to let your values weigh in the
16:33 decision-m to ask yourself what's
16:35 actually helpful here? What's the right
16:37 amount of [ __ ] to give? Is this even my
16:39 problem? Am I perhaps enabling more of
16:41 the problem? It's like watching someone
16:43 fall in sink in the quicksand. empathy
16:44 immediately dives in after them.
16:47 Compassion goes and finds a rope. In
16:48 this kind of competitive world,
16:50 strategic compassion and not reactive
16:52 empathy is the skill that allows you to
16:54 care without being consumed, to act with
16:56 integrity without losing effectiveness.
16:58 In this way, you're able to adopt an
17:00 aspect of the dark triad without going
17:03 fully evil yourself. Number two, stop
17:05 seeking universal approval. One of the
17:07 most self-destructive traits you can
17:09 carry into a competitive environment is
17:11 the need for constant external
17:13 validation. And the tricky part, it
17:15 often wears a disguise. It can look like
17:17 kindness, cooperation, and humility. But
17:20 underneath, it's just plain neediness.
17:22 Here's an uncomfortable truth for you.
17:24 Wanting everyone to like you is itself a
17:26 subtle form of narcissism. It's another
17:27 version of making everything in the
17:29 world about yourself. Paradoxically, it
17:31 is only when you find reasons that
17:33 you're willing to be disliked that you
17:34 will finally be able to stop living for
17:36 yourself and do the right thing for the
17:38 sake of doing the right thing. Number
17:40 three, learn when to speak up even when
17:43 you're uncertain. I say this because, as
17:44 we talked about, the world doesn't
17:46 reward who's right. It usually rewards
17:48 who is seen. And there's real science
17:50 behind that. It's when our brains assume
17:52 that the person who talks the most must
17:54 be the leader. In group settings, we
17:56 subconsciously assign power to whoever
17:58 commands the floor, regardless of what
18:00 they're actually saying. That means in
18:01 meetings, debates, even casual
18:03 conversation, the one who speaks the
18:05 most often will usually walk away
18:07 perceived as the most competent. And not
18:10 because they had the best ideas, but
18:12 because they risked the most ideas and
18:15 they had the most airtime. So, what does
18:17 this mean for you? It means you can't
18:19 afford to stay quiet. If you have ideas,
18:22 [ __ ] say it. If you disagree, voice
18:24 it. Because staying silent to avoid
18:26 being wrong is how you get overlooked.
18:28 But speaking up is how you get seen,
18:31 remembered, and respected. If you're
18:33 unsure, speak anyway. Isaac Newton, the
18:35 same guy who redefined physics, spent 30
18:38 years obsessed with alchemy, a [ __ ]
18:39 pseudocience. He wrote over a million
18:41 words on it. And the reason you never
18:43 hear about this is because it was
18:45 [ __ ] stupid. Arguably the smartest
18:46 man who ever lived spent most of his
18:48 adult life on a pseudocience and nobody
18:51 remembers it or cares. Because it's few
18:53 good ideas were so great, nothing else
18:55 mattered. So here's the lesson. One
18:57 great idea will undo the damage of a
18:59 thousand bad ones. And until you speak
19:01 up, you'll never know which of those
19:03 ideas are the great ones. It's kind of
19:04 like YouTube videos. Sometimes you got
19:06 to make a hundred of them just to figure
19:07 out which ones is actually worth
19:09 watching. Which is why you should watch
19:11 this one.
