Name: Why the Worst People Are So Successful
Uploaded: 2025-09-17T15:40:05.000Z
Duration: 19 min 15 s
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It's 2016, Uber has spread globally at an unprecedented rate and broken every rule along the way.

The company has been illegally surveilling drivers and customers for years.

They have violated local laws in dozens of countries and municipalities.

They've stolen trade secrets and IP from competitors and at the time are secretly following journalists who have been critical of the company in an effort to blackmail them.

At the center of the storm is Travis Kalanick, a brazen but brilliant CEO and founder who has, despite the mounting pressure, remained relatively unscathed.

But another year passes and the wheels come off, pun totally intended.

Google sues Uber for stealing their trade secrets.

The New York Times reports that Uber knowingly misled regulators about their technology.

Female employees start filing sexual harassment lawsuits.

A video leaks of Kalanick berating an Uber driver.

Kalanick is out entirely, at least as CEO of Uber, reportedly under pressure.

Kalanick is finally pushed out and forced to resign a few months later.

Kalanick walked away with a sweet ass $3 billion comp package, got plenty of funding for his other companies and is now kicking back in his $43 million Beverly Hills mansion, counting his money and laughing about it.

You look around and you see this in the world time after time.

The liar, the narcissist, the bully, they're not just surviving, they're thriving.

They're on the covers of magazines, running billion dollar companies and racking up followers and influence.

And meanwhile, the honest, kind, decent people, burned out, broke, invisible.

If that feels backwards to you, well, it's because it kind of is.

In fact, there's a brutal logic to why the worst people often win in life.

And in this video, we're gonna get into why.

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From the time we're young, we're taught that the world rewards virtue, being kind, playing fair, helping others.

But that's only because the world we start in is small.

When your environment is limited to family, classmates, close friends, altruism actually works, meaning that when you share, and you help others, and you're being considerate, you're not only showing good manners, you're practicing a strategy that is nurturing your development.

And this way, your reputation is built on your character.

You learn that doing good often leads to getting good back.

As we become adults, we move into larger systems.

Corporations, governments, fucking TikTok.

And we realize that the old rules start to break down.

The feedback loops that once rewarded virtue become distorted or lost.

You see, our moral instincts were designed for small groups, where harm was immediate, visible, and personal.

But when you scale things up, when you add distance, complexity, and layers of abstraction, those instincts start to fail.

Imagine seeing a child in front of you being forced into slave labor.

You'd probably feel immediate outrage and try to do something.

But now imagine that same child hidden behind global supply chains, company logos, and a sleek online storefront, oh, and also 5,000 miles away, and your attention is not on exploitation anymore.

Instead, it's on the shiny new product that's 10% off.

Human attention is limited, and we can only focus on a few things at a time, usually things that we can see or people that we can talk to.

So when confronted with global complexity, our minds lose track of everything.

It's too hard to think about the child labor in Africa or the actions of the Russian government.

Emotional feedback, which usually helps us sense what's right from wrong, gets lost in the infinite complexity of our modern systems.

As a result, our natural ethical signals become very faint.

And when they do come through, our attention shifts, not towards what's most right or wrong, but towards what's loudest and most visible.

This is why the moral outrages of the day are usually completely detached from reality.

More people die of coal pollution each year than all of nuclear power accidents combined across human history.

Yet environmentalists are protesting nuclear reactors and not the coal plants.

In these large-scale systems, people only care about what is the loudest and commands the most attention.

And by constantly being distracted by what is loud, we open the door for those who are extremely good at manipulating attention and taking advantage of inattention, the egomaniacs, the narcissists, and the tyrants.

In the early 1500s, Niccolò Machiavelli lived in a world steeped in corruption and political upheaval.

Unlike today, Renaissance Italy didn't have the glossy corporate veneer of an HR department or DEI codes of conduct.

It had poisonings, public executions, secret alliances, and political backstabbing.

But despite the dangerous conditions he lived in, he wasn't just some armchair philosopher scribbling in isolation.

Machiavelli was deep in the trenches, advising princes and kings.

For over a decade, he served as a senior diplomat and advisor to the Florentine Republic, negotiating with popes, kings, mercenaries, basically anyone who held the reins of power.

And through it all, he saw how the game was actually played.

Power, he realized, didn't reward virtue.

It rewarded instinct, survival, and cunning.

Power didn't favor the best or most morally upright men.

It favored the last one standing, usually over someone else's dead body.

And so from this brutal landscape, Machiavelli offered a conclusion that still makes people squirm.

It is better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.

Machiavelli pointed out something everyone saw but didn't really want to see.

The higher you climbed in the rungs of power, the more amoral you had to become.

And the same traits that harm you locally can potentially reward you globally.

Of course, nobody liked hearing this, so they killed Machiavelli and tortured him until he gave up names.

No, just kidding, he actually had a stomach virus.

Anyway, as Nietzsche later put it, terribleness is part of greatness.

So I'd like to take a moment and discuss some of these traits that make you a horrible person to your friends and family, but actually might make you a billionaire or prime minister if you play your cards right.

In psychology, they've identified three of these strategic personalities.

Together, they are called the Dark Triad.

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Why the Worst People Are So Successful

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empathy