Why Feminism Scares Fathers - Bryan Caplan

what is feminism in your opinion great question I don't want to say what it is in my opinion what I want to say rather is how do we actually use the word anyone can just make up a new definition what I really wanted to think about was let's listen to other people and see what definition fits actual usage and the definition that I offer is this one feminism is the view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women feminism is the view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women uh if you look at official definitions they will say things like it's just the view that men and women should be treated equally what I point out in my essays we got public opinion data where we ask a whole lot of people and guess what almost everyone who says they're not a feminist still thinks that men and women should be treated equally so that cannot possibly be the actual definition it's more of an argumentative definition like calling your newspaper truth and then if someone disagrees with you say oh you're against truth right okay so it's a lexical Brazilian jiu-jitsu yes right I understand why are you not a fan of it you wrote a book for your 10-year-old daughter called don't be a feminist uh that is correct I mean honestly it just comes down to the empirics is it really true that our society generally treats men more fairly than women uh what I did in that essay just go over all of the main complaints that people have to this effect and try to see does the evidence really hold up um I begin by saying look you can't just say that someone's treated unfairly because the performance is unequal by that standard I've been treated unfairly by the Olympics because I don't have any medals what you really need to do is to go and compare someone's performance to the treatment some the treatment they've gotten to their performance uh here's an economist the natural thing to start with is with earnings and Career Success there's been a lot of work on this and the standard punchline is it's very easy to explain the gender gap in Career Success by differences in things like the number of hours that men and women work the majors that they select in college just the unpleasantness of the jobs so if we go through some fairly standard differences and and of course as well as just your priorities in life is the job the top priority in your life or there other things that you're balancing and when you put all that together you can very easily statistically explain almost all of the difference in earnings between men and women so that's one that I talk about quite a bit then I also go over things like complaints about inequities and dating right this is where I point out there is a very strong tendency among feminists to go and compare the average woman to the most successful men which is not really a sensible comparison what do they comparing body count ah no you know thing you know things more like you know how good is the Romantic life of the very most successful men versus the very most successful women right so if you compare like the lives of a Hollywood actor to a Hollywood actress and say now the Hollywood actors have it better right you know no no there's no female you know no no actress is like Leonardo DiCaprio just going for with regards to what they're mating success yes so you know things like mating success or let's see of course also in jobs is saying like a certain percentage of the CEOs are men are you larger than 50% percentage CEOs are men and what I say is look if we're going to do that we need to compare both the top and the bottom and there again there is overwhelming evidence that men are over represented at the bottom as well as the top men are much more likely to be in prison much more likely to commit suicide much more likely to be homeless much more likely to be in cels to have never been on a date so you put all this together it's like it's not in any sense that men in general are treated more fairly than women in general rather what we have is that there is a greater spread which again if anything based upon normal ideas of insurance the group that has the smaller spread is the advantage group what you mean when you say smaller spread and bigger spread uh well for things like uh you are less likely to be far from average so for example highs spread would be a group that has a lot of billionaires and a lot of homeless people men a low spread would be a group that has fewer billionaires and fewer homeless people which would be women right or similarly you could go and look at the top of achievement and say men are over represented in Nobel prizes in being best-selling authors right U like in being famous composers that's all true says well while we're at it how about we go and take a look to see whether men are also over represented among homeless among suicides among the unemployed you long you know so and let's see actually the last one's a little more complicated but the other ones are all solid examples where we can see wait a second it looks like men are actually on those measures they're over represented among those doing worst I'm going to guess that if you did a guine genie coefficient for men you would have much higher inequality on pick whatever outcome it is that you want lifespan Health span happiness mental IQ income body count all the rest of it so body counts probably the main exception because there are prostitutes who just have enormous numbers of Partners they they probably increase the inequality for women right but all of your other ones are I think very good and by the way like just what I'm doing is what I think everyone should be doing on these issues which is not just going and saying I have a philosophy and it applies in all cases it's like let's think about the individual facts of the individual cases and maybe your theory will work eight times out of 10 someone who thinks the theory Works a thousand times out of a thousand it's like yeah that's doesn't sound like anything that happens to any actual theory about human behavior it's more like someone who's so dogmatic and fanatical in their sense of their own omn omniscience that all facts get twisted to fit the theory why is it the case in your opinion then that feminism is still such a pervasive cultural meme if your assessment of it is correct which is that the lack of fairness doesn't seem to be affecting women in the way that it's proposed right that is a great question I mean your wording makes it sound sort of like feminism is is on the decline but it's still lingering whereas I'd say it's probably at least near its alltime peak in terms of what's going on here is my story I think there's an actually very general human tendency to care more about female well-being and especially female suffering I don't think that this is unique to the modern world of Western countries think that you can read almost any anything written by human beings from almost any period and you'll see this Norm you can go and read ancient books like the Bible and if you want to show that someone's really bad you show them murdering women right same thing in mythology this is just a general human attitude that murdering men it's like well you know maybe at it coming but murdering women that is something something that it is just a a deeply rooted feeling in human nature that is especially horrible and what I think has happened in the modern world is that we start with these very standard human feelings that I think are indeed deeply rooted in human nature and evolution and then it becomes a philosophy and once you make something a philosophy then you take an attitude which can be balanced against other attitudes or it just be hypocrisy and it doesn't get that bad as as it gets implemented but once BEC a philosophy then there's a demand for consistency and once there's a demand for consistency then you start overruling everything else that actually comes down on the other side and also treating doubt and questions as Sin and that is I think what really explains the success of feminism is that it codifies human feelings that have always been around but nevertheless have been held inconsistently and hypocritically before which my view is given that the philosophy is wrong hypocrisy and inconsistency is an improvement over consistency and and single-minded devotion yeah I it's an interesting point I certainly agree based on all of the data that I've seen plus just my intuitive sense of myself people seem to have an awful lot more sympathy for women falling behind despite the fact that men on average seem to be falling further behind there's studies that have been done people will donate way more if they find out that it's an all women's shelter than if it's an all Men's Shelter new St women are wonderful effect yes news stories that uh proclaim the successes of women seem to be treated more favorably than ones that proclaim the successes of men there's this gamma bias that Dr John Barry's identified which you may be familiar with I mean when are there ever stories about successful men I mean unless it's like a homeless guy getting a job but it's very hard to even picture what these what this these stories are I can't remember two two things that I think are interesting here first one being I don't don't disagree that if you were to find out that women had been murdered throughout history you would have gone oh my God like this is an aberration whereas sort of male mortality is just a byproduct of existence that being said women being sexually assaulted by some Waring tribe you know I I learned about um the cultural history of um how relationships have evolved from a sort of culturally memetic standpoint and women have basically been property they've been property of their kin they've been property of their family they've been property of their husbands for a very long time so I would agree that out on the extremes for women there are it's treated as an aberration but there's certainly a lot of mistreatment which has just been ah it's part it's a Weezy it's a woozy it's a we where the new tribe we're taking over the old one so there's there's some uh again it's the not 1,000 times out of a thousand thing right I mean there I would point out that the usual story is we first murder all the men and then we slave the women which is terrible but still it's like well which one you which one would you rather be yeah I'd rather be enslaved than murdered probably who you're enslaved by yes does that there is a little bit of that although there's also is there a suicide opportunity to in case it turns out to be worse um definitely my preference is enslave me first and then I will be looking for my way out if it turns out to be more horrible than death itself yeah on the you know on the question of the legal treatment of women of course that a lot of most of this is in the premodern period where we just don't have a lot of good data I mean there's the legal Doctrine where I think that at least often you are correct although even there it's a little complicated things like under Roman law father is just legally entit to murder any of his children regardless of their gender um now once you hear that it's like well but they weren't actually doing it like yeah I think that's true I think it is extremely unusual as Darwin would predict for someone to murder their own children even when it's totally legal but then I think you do have to look at well what's the fact of the matter is it really true that in a society where women were legally considered to be the property of the father that he act that fathers actually did often dispose of their daughters as if they were sheep or rather is it like they rather were they normal human beings where whatever the law says your daughter says I don't want to marry him daddy and he's like oh well I couldn't possibly say no to her she was crying I think that again there are human universals and while there're are of course cruel people who will do terrible things if the law allows it much more common for the emotions that we take for granted today to have always existed and like whining the emotion of of whining and complaining yeah I mean you think that started after the like because the law changed okay yeah like like of course people people have always been doing these kinds of things and again just the way that if you read the literature of of earlier periods you'll see that it does not seem like women are living in fear of their fathers going and doing things to them because yeah Evolution fathers love their children children they love their daughters they love their sons and then on you know on top of this this is ba very basic human feeling that women's suffering is especially important um so you know like my favorite example of this that I mentioned was the Hillary Clinton quote about how women are the biggest losers in war because they lose Fathers and Sons just like um um yeah don't the Fathers and Sons lose more because they're dead yeah well this uh are you familiar with gamma bias have you heard this before see maybe under so mean is it like like not caring much about the lowest status people or what is it it's specifically men so uh Dr John bar Center for male psychology came up with this it's really interesting Insight once you see it you can't unsee it um if there is a story which is pro female it will sex the person if it's Pro male it will desex it if it's anti-male it will sex the person if it's anti- female it will desex it ah yes very so you end up with a skew so for instance so why is it called the gamma I don't know you'd have to ask him he's been on the show and I'm pretty sure I did uh I feel like there's other biases that come before it and this this happens to be there because it's in order I'm not sure anyway um yeah that makes perfect sense so for instance uh Sarah everard was this um young woman walking through a park in the UK she was killed by a male police officer absolutely terrible right and and there was um a lot of protests about women don't feel safe in these streets it was a flasho for for sort of sex relations one week later a man drowned jumping into the river temps to save a woman who had gone in the story essentially wasn't covered and when it was covered his sex wasn't revealed it was uh Londoner jumps in to save person from drowning or woman from drowning or something like that so you do get this skew but okay I mean what would be in your opinion it sounds like at least part of the problem feminism has a branding problem right that it's coming in with an awful lot of baggage mimetically culturally what given the fact that there are still causes that women need to have support for even in the modern world what would be your proposal for a uh sanitized new version of something that could talk about women's issues I mean honestly I think I would say that step one is just to get the facts and find out whether it's even true that women are doing especially badly and if that is the opposite is true then it's like well seems like we should be focused on men but you what is it you can Pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time there will be certain areas in which we would want to focus on men for instance uh I know that you've got some views on circumcision I think I align pretty much with your views on that like that's a very particular wing of male disadvantage right um looking at is there a way that we can get women to become mothers and then get them back into the workforce that's like a very specific element of this so would you try and make everything quite sort of disperate and have okay we're going to have a employment for mother's department and we're going to have a we need to not circumcise our children Department um I mean that Pat your head and rub your belly thing is uh quite striking because it's uh of course a lot of people can't do that um what I would say is that there's always priorities and anytime that you say that my issue is super important you are implicitly actually saying that the other issues are at least I I should go and get some of the attention that other issues are get usually you're a little hazy about what issues you want to deemphasize but yeah I do think that there are actually good reasons once you realize that a problem is not a big deal not to go and emphasize it and not to go and prioritize it uh you've probably heard of effective altruism it's this idea that philanthropy should be based upon first of all how big is the problem second of all how much can we do about it and what's the actual payoff that we get so I would say that would be the general guide I mean I do think that you know not focusing on gender is at least a good presumption because it is the kind of thing that promotes the two negative emotions that I'm mourning my daughter about in the essay which first of all antipathy of just being angry at a bunch of other people who really are not even responsible or at least you know most of them are not and then self-pity of just feeling like a victim so I so like you don't want to have a philosophy that encourages antipathy or self-pity human nature already naturally does way too much of both of these it is better to go and try to Free Yourself of antipathy and self-pity than it is to Foster them or create a whole philosophy that justifies them honestly I think that there are a number of major issues that the view that there is a problem is just false so like the gender pay Gap I just think that it is false to say that women are being mistreated by labor markets so the best thing would be if there is first of all a recognition of this fact second of all an apology for making a lot of false accusations and then we just we're just done with it we move on so labor markets are actually very fair people are getting paid based upon their performance if you have different preferences the market lets you satisfy those be grateful and stop the complaining and if you say well I personally am being mistreated like well then that's you know mostly like like life is not perfectly fair but it's not an issue primarily of or even according to the evidence like you know of being a woman it's just that life's unfair right so you would deal with that on a Case by case basis yes and just say or and of course if an individual says I'm being treated unfairly my normal advice is hm like is the person you're dealing with at all open reason it's like well no if they were we already talked about like well you probably need to get away for that person right or unless there's some other more you know person above that person that's open to reason but I mean this is just like practical guidance for living life you can't expect that other people are going to be fair to you overall and you need to be on the one hand looking out for yourself but also not creating a big story about how life is not fair to you or to your kind when the evidence doesn't back that up what do you think are the tradeoffs that feminism is making at the moment because what is it it seems to me like women aren't necessarily benefiting from feminism in the way that they might think but are they being hurt by it h that's a good question I mean and in a way it it's sort of reinforces my point that we especially care about women suffering the arguments against feminism that the most acceptable are the on where we say it's actually hurting women right those are the ones like oh my God that's terrible the most Pro the most Pro feminist argument is the anti-feminist argument yes um in terms of what's going on so I I I think for at the individual level the main issue is just promoting negative attitudes of antipathy and self-pity what I tell my daughter is like it is just not true that men in general are out to get you or won't like you you know my advice is if you want to do well in the world go and make make make as many friends as you can especially friends with people that are in position to go and help you and the way that you make friends is by being friendly to them and being and not having and and having a positive and constructive attitude so and I say like antipathy gets in the way of that antipathy just makes your default oh this person is going to treat me badly this person is going to be unreasonable or unfair so there's that and then same thing with the self-pity like like you know self-pity is really baked into human nature like you never need to encourage it there's just so much Sal poor me I don't have the latest iPhone it's totally human nature to feel that way so like really what you need to focus on is everything you've got all your opportunities be grateful for what you have and this is the attitude of a of a person that is going to be successful so those are the main issues in terms of the individual woman i' say that there's this other big effect of just mistreating men right which again is not like said wait well mistreating men well who cares about them like that's the attitude that I I'm saying is a terrible attitude it's bad to be unjust a man you you should not be unjust to anyone the fact that they're men doesn't mean that it's okay and that whatever happens to them too bad like this is payback for 2,000 years of them mistreating us I like well was that true either so there's that in you know you know in ter in terms of sort of like Collective harmm you know there's there is a lot of work on things like discrimination law saying that if people are worried you're going to sue them this is a reason for them to not hire in the first place I think that there's definitely something going on there and it's something to consider in terms of whether sex discrimination law in general benefits women though on balance it still might but you know it's a benefit that is based upon a deep Injustice wow okay yeah so uh the widespread litigious nature of women especially being super vigilant for potential um mistreatment in the workplace could cause some employers to look at a woman and think she looks like she's got a good solicitor let's not hire her in case something occurs down the line yeah I mean I I know uh oh yeah I mean so probably one of the best examples where I think it is true that women were hurt by me too specifically is there is a couple papers showing that mentorship crashed after me too yep I've seen these and that is obviously beneficial to women to go and get extra training from someone but uh strikingly the main feminist response to this was we will not tolerate this reaction we will we we will it is totally ridiculous to go and penalize us because of this irrational fear that you might get sued and we're we just need to go and tell men that this is not acceptable and yeah well this is a situation where they're going to totally agree and then probably keep doing what is not hire you in any case for them or not meant you know hiring is it's one where it's formal and so it's easier to litigate but mentorship is informal and anything informal is very hard to litigate unless you're going to have a system that just convicts people on an accusation which I think is a lot of what feminists want to do so what what what I'm feeling here is on on average of course there is I I emphasize everything is on average that's fine the entire podcast is on average dot dot dot excellent um what I'm feeling here is an echo I'm I'm sensing the equivalency on the male side of the Spectrum which I'm sure that you've seen movement like the black pill movement um incel ideology stuff like that I have a number of friends that are very deep into the research with this uh and I do think that there's way less misogyny in these groups than you might think the actual most misogynistic men are the ultra high performing Chads not the ones that are the uh sort of uh forgotten Monster Energy marinated incels but there is an awful lot of self-pity there is an awful lot of antipathy within the these groups toward the opposite sex so this isn't necessarily uh a feminist Quirk this is a natural human response that can then be kind of perpetuated and spun up once you get into a group that has an outre yes absolutely so I have been actually doing compare and contrast reading incel the incel wiki and then I think the fem geek Wiki there's a lot of similarity between them I mean I've noticed that in arguing with feminists they often say Brian you're just repeating incel talking points I'm like no um I am I am saying some things that they say that are true while not actually adopting the whole philosophy which I agree is a very destructive one of antipathy and self bitty what I would say is that the incels that you so despise they really are the mirim of you and I think of myself as being someone who's just trying to fairly arbitrate between two unreasonable groups um it and you know and you know course to go and say that women you know on you know on balance are not treated less fairly than men does not mean that there aren't any specific female complaints that are true of course there are um but also there are some specific male complaints that are true and and then like course like the more you read them the more you realize well look people just need to tolerate some level of unfairness in society because otherwise people will barely be able to breathe it's like yeah and that goes both ways do you remember uh Scott Aronson's description of his experience probably what 15 years old now maybe 10 years old something like that that blog post could you explain for the people who aren't familiar with this and then Scott Alexander's Untitled uh blog post after that could you give I think this really instructive yeah um for the record so I'm good friends with Scott arenson I've hung out with the mot in Texas uh but I also have read the pieces so I I will claim to have some inside knowledge of the situation although filtered through his perspective but I trust scottt I trust both Scotts but I especially Trust Scott arenson who I know well personally so Scott Aronson did a piece for his blog Shadle optimized where he and this is barely even a caricature of it he said look I'm I 98% agree with feminism like like I'm so on board I care so much but I just want to say one thing which is that when I was a teenager I was almost suicidal or really I was suicidal because I read a lot of feminist writings when I just felt like any thought I had about women was wrong any attempt to go and talk to them any attempt to go and just have some desperate hope eort hopeless effort to go and find a girlfriend was wrong thought that anything that I might do or say would be harassment and you know eventually I learn better but anyway it'd be nice if in the midst of fighting actual Injustice against women you could just go and show A Little Bit of Sympathy a little little bit of understanding for shy male neres like myself especially when they're young and they just don't have much experience and they don't understand what's going on on and then the feminist reaction to this was generally hysterical calling him a rapist or an incipient rapist entitled yes yes entitled like you know you think that you have a right to sex and it's like he didn't say any of those things you rather what he said is you know I pledge 98% you 98% of what you say is true and I just have a few slight doubts and you just be a little bit nicer the that's it and for that like like the reaction was so just absurd and insane and it is it is the one where you just look at that and you say like like you know this is a cult of Fanatics he's talking about I did get a chance actually to tell Scott like did that really make you rethink that whole 98% thing I'm not gonna repeat Scott's answer but I definitely did hassle him about that say how about we go down more to like 5% from 98 could we do that look so his here's the thing that I think is uh the the inevitable ping pong game that occurs happening and I saw this with Melissa Carie who came on the podcast recently she wrote a book called uh the two parent privilege uh how America stopped getting married and started falling behind something like that she is a policy wonk from Washington DC and I tried in the episode to uh push her Beyond just what is the data telling us to what is the implication and maybe even what is the cause of this like what's the give me the mechanism why is it the case what is happening developmentally amongst the children and she was very tentative right you know she's written this big book about things but she very much kind of defined the rules of play of where where she wasn't going to get out over her skis with regards to this and I was like that's like a I I wish that she'd just bro signs to we through stuff because it's funny but what she did was she decided I'm going to hold myself within this sort of uh within my realm of expertise and I was like that's a pretty good indication of somebody that's acting in good faith with a lot of like and trying to be really really accurate with what they say since she's released it she has been slammed online absolutely slammed and what I've seen although I don't think that this is going to happen to her I've seen somebody who is probably on a political COMPASS test center left certainly somebody who wrote a book to try and reduce inequality between Class groups right this is exactly exacerbating the precise inequality that we don't want to have happen and so on and so forth and it was written as far as I can see with a good amount of compassion but I'm seeing the exact mechanism by which many people become radical ized to one side or another side of some sort of a because they think well I mean if I guess the only people that are ever going to listen to me about the woes that I have about the Justified or sometimes unjustified antipathy or self-pity that I've got well I like I'm going to go with the group that accept me accepts me I'm not going to keep on you know trying to work here's 98% of my entire world going toward you group that says that you despise me and I'm an entitled [ __ ] Insel or something like that rap rapist rapist for like a rapist in his heart is like straight out of the New Testament original sin so yeah just my point being that you know I see here um especially the antipathy it creates this ever escalating cycle right that spins up and up and up and people become uh more virulent in their distaste and their uh lack of ability to see the other side's issue and this is how you have you know two groups of people largely just talking past each other mhm yeah I mean think about what Scott Alexander calls the gray tribe and this is the which he admits it's still a tribe but it's a tribe with different norms and better Norms that's trying to not actually fall into being either of the other either the blue tribe or the red tribe as we call them confusingly here in the US um so every other country in the world red equals left but somehow in the US red equals right got the wrong way around yes uh and then blue I don't know what side of the road that you drive on you got it the wrong way around yes but where I think like we're at least the only country that has this color scheme but yeah yeah uh but anyway um yeah so that's makes quite a lot of sense I me think we're mentioning then you know the Scott arenson reaction to this was just to write a piece defend or excuse me the Scott Alexander reaction was to write a piece standing up for Scott Aronson and saying yes like there is this group of shy male nerds who want to talk to women they're not very good at it doesn't mean that they have any horrible anything any horrible plans like they're very usually very nice people it's just that they don't really know how to talk to women and the only way to learn is to try it and not be very good at it at first so can't you go and cut them some slack I think is totally reasonable point you had an idea about why we all get accused of being pickpockets what was that right this was specifically a reference to the humiliation of mandatory training that happens here at universities a lot um so so you like imagine if there was some kind of mandatory pickpocket training where they bring in all the workers and they say pickpocketing is wrong don't pickpocket others pickpocketing others means reaching into their pockets without permission and taking their stuff and then keeping it don't be a pickpocket all right and it's like okay um why are you telling me this though like I know all this already this is all quite obvious and and yet to me this is very much what most sensitivity train is like what most of the training about you know like Internet Security is like they're telling you a bunch of totally obvious stuff and again why well a lot of it is really just seems to be to humiliate you to say look we we are going to talk to you like children and you have to sit there and suck it up tough luuck some of it is for legal purposes where if they get sued they can say we told them not to do it right as if the main reason people pickpocket is they don't they no one ever told them not to do it or they don't understand what would constitute it although another part of it is ratcheting up the definition so that almost anything counts as pickpocketing where it's like well you looked at what was in someone's pocket without their consent that's a kind of pickpocketing so I think that's also what's going on and once you have your training set up they do often start having higher and higher standards now I say this just to go and make fun of various training that you'll see especially on college campuses about sexual rment it's like don't sleep with their students oh I didn't know we weren't supposed to do that oh thank you like come on like we all know this right you know the reason why people are doing it isn't because they aren't aware of the rules the reason they're doing it is because they don't like the rules and the rules are stopping them from doing what they want so again if it really an issue of something that's really confusing be a different story so maybe actually the Internet Security at least you might think that that's more complicated although honestly having gone through internet security training I'll say that the stuff they train you on is so basic because honestly they need to make a test that can be passed by the lowest IQ person in the organization and therefore they can't really be hard because otherwise they'd have to fire people over failing their it test it training over over they don't want to do that so one of the things that we're both fans of is uh agency trying to give people a sense of personal agency individual sovereignty it seems to me and I hadn't thought of these two words before but it seems like antipathy and pity are yeah self-pity the pity for others antipathy and self-pity are probably about as close to solvents for agency as possible like it will dissolve your ability to feel like a an agentic individual oh yeah that's a great point I mean yeah because like what I like to tell people is imagine a person who has the absolute maximum reason to feel antipathy and self-pity like someone who was stabbed in the back and now they're paralyzed and they know the person who did it you know like I don't know it was like your your ex-wife stabbed you in the back now you're paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of your life so you have every reason to hate this person every reason to feel sorry for yourself and the question is if you wanted to help this person would you go to them and say be full of antipathy be full of self-pity like of course not You' be trying to go and come up with some story to make them feel better and it's like well okay I like I understand why you would be overwhelmed with antipathy and self-pity but you got to get past that because if you're going to have any enjoyment out of life if you're going to be able to salvage any part of what you're hoping for you're G to have to go and focus on what you can do and what you can have now and just being angry at the at the woman who did this to you and feeling sorry for for poor you though completely Justified is totally unconstructive what would you say then given that we have an incredibly broad number of people who are wallowing in a low agency existence what's your prescription uh philosophically or tactically or strategically for getting someone from antipathy and self-pity into agency the movie What About Bob actually the lead psychologist in it has a book called Baby Steps about how someone who has problems needs to give up on the idea of solving them all overnight and instead just try to take small little steps of improvement um you know the character is mock worthy in the movie but I think it's totally sensible if a person is having trouble with life don't say fix everything overnight just say all right look let's take some small steps and move from there so that's what I would be in by doing I mean in terms of philosophy I'd say that philosophically it's easier to go and just realize a philosophy is wrong than to get rid of all the negative negativity that the philosophy has inspired you you know just the very fact that you decide the philosophy is incorrect doesn't mean you won't you'll stop feeling bad about the things the philosophy taught you to feel bad about uh but still I would I would say all right well just you know next time that you are feeling bad about this remember like there's a philosophy that originally got me feeling bad about this the philosophy is wrong so now try to go and rethink the situation from a different point of view I would say that as well I mean also I honestly I would just say don't hang out like another good baby step is hang out more with people who who do not feel so much antipathy and self-pity so that your new your group is encouraging you to improve instead of holding you back yeah I think uh the story that you tell yourself about why you're feeling bad and what does it mean that I feel bad and what is the story that I tell myself about that this kind of recursive uh narrative game that you play with yourself probably counts for a big chunk of the discontent and the pain that you feel right yeah you have the situation but then you have these layers of guilt and shame and doubt and self-esteem or lack thereof that you layer on top and I think that is where the uh philosophical worldview comes in quite importantly like is this happening to me did I get to choose this you know there's a a study which I'm sure you've seen about two rats are in uh Wheels one rat runs and when it runs the other rat has to run the one rat that runs gets all of the benefits from exercise and the rat that has to run gets all of the downsides from stress the point being that know being able to take your sense of control your locus of control being internal is a very very large part of of life and uh mean what's interesting about that to me is that I actually have a moderate Locust control because I just think it's true that luck is important in life I you know so I realized that it would probably be psychologically better for me to have the false belief that there's no luck but I just think that's such an insane view that I'm not going to so blind myself to the fact well you kind of got lucky making this friend at that right that time and it's youed by your own rationality yeah yeah so but you know like it's also like you just be really positive about the things that you can change focus on those you don't need to tell yourself a big lie in order to motivate yourself to say look there's a lot of stuff that's in my power and I'm gonna do that stuff this do remind me of one of my favorite movies uh I hope this isn't giving away giving away in spoilers but it's so obscure that I just doubt that anyone would watch it anyway but it's called The Upside of Anger and the basic plot and I you ever seen have you seen it by any chance no uh the basic plot is that there is a dad of you know there's a family there's a mom a dad and I think there four daughters and the dad runs off of the secretary and just disappears and abandons the entire family and the mom becomes a terrible raging alcoholic and she just hates the world she's so mad and then there's the interaction between her and the daughters and on and on and then at the end of the movie they discover that it is not true the father ran away or abandoned them the father just fell into a ditch and died and and he had and nothing to do with the secretary or anything else and then you just realize wow you learn a fact and then you suddenly realize all this these this anger that I had is just wrong just predicated on a totally false story of the world and in watching the movie you can almost instantly see people saying like I don't feel angry anymore because my anger was based upon a story that is false now I don't think that just abandoning a whole philosophy of life is going to make it quite as easy to feel good as that one very particular sense of betrayal but you like really in the story it's very psychologically credible that the anger just gets replaced with a sense of horrible guilt that how could I have so wrongly judged this person who actually was loyal to his family the whole time and had an accident so I swear this makes sense in my mind let's see if it makes sense in public I went to dinner with uh RFK Jr about 3 months ago when he was in Austin was a bunch of there was a bunch of different people there lots of interesting people uh one of them was Tim Kennedy who's a Green Beret you might know he lives in Austin he does a a sort of um selfdefense thing called Sheep dog response Tim Kennedy was open carrying as he does because that's that's he's an ex you say did you say Tim Kennedy yes so so wait is he is he also a Kennedy uh actually different different Kennedy I was getting confused by the story UFC fighter Green Beret but but unrelated to the Kennedy family precisely correct all of RFK Jr's security was outside he had some staff in with him but it was a lady PR person and maybe an assistant of some kind and some other stuff he had no security inside tons outside right but no security inside and I would remember looking at the gun on uh Tim's hip and thinking if he pulled that gun out now and shot RFK Jr in the head his entire career would be gone back over with a tooth comb to work out exactly the moment when he became a Russian Sleeper Agent oh it was that UFC fight that they did in Abu Dhabi when secretly the Saudi Prince met him backstage and that was when they changed him and the every podcast he's ever done would be reanalyzed bit by bit he did this series called finding Hitler searching for Hitler or whatever oh the the reason he did that was to get into Argentina because that's where they've got and what I realized was like individual actions can cause retroactively for the entire story to be rechanged and it's almost like the same as what you're talking about right that his entire life would have been looked at in a different manner so yeah I totally see how that's the case one of the things I guess to just round out this sort of agency part that I think would be interesting to find out from you is if somebody is or somebody has a friend that is struggling with the self-pity and the antipathy and the externalized locus of control overly externalized locus of control what have you found anything that is a good Salve for that that can kind of start to give people a little bit of perspective look you can enact change in your life there are things that you can do this isn't just happening to you is there anything philosophically that you find yourself relying on if you end up getting too close to antipathy and self-pity I think much more often about how to make people feel happier with their lives and how to raise their locus of control um I so normally what I tell them is look the most important cause of human happiness or unhappiness is whether you're spending a lot of time with people's company you enjoy um now that itself comes down to locus of control like well I I am with I am stuck with people whose company I don't enjoy and I say well like you're not really stuck with them like you may say you're stuck with them but you could go and try you know like you know like go through your mental Ro deck of people who already know aren't there some people that you like more that you don't spend much time with and could you try to spend more time with them some people that you like less and you could just turn down the dial a bit you don't need to start purging your grandma because she has a big mouth you could just see her half as often so but I would think of that as actually itself you T definitely touching on Locust of control because you are telling them to go and take you know take actions in order to go and make and make themselves happier so I guess I would probably start there in terms of just saying look you know focus on things that you can do that will improve your life and things that you can do don't focus on what you can't do I think that's all totally reasonable I mean I recently did two really popular posts one on advice for men on finding their soulmate and the other one on advice for women on finding their soulmate I think if you go through a lot of it is basically saying like you know exert more Locust of control right so like you know like there's a lot of things you can do and these are some of the easiest steps you can take in order to make what you want to happen happen but yeah if you just sit there saying like poor me then yeah nothing's gonna happen of course you know at least almost certainly you you could just wait to be saved someone says oh I'm Gonna Save You what were the important differences between men finding their soulmate and women finding their soulmate let's see good one I think for both groups I said put less weight on physical attractiveness although I think for men I said it's especially important for them to put less weight on that and I said look just consider this thought experiment imagine you're married to a super model but she has a terrible personality how do you feel about your life like everyone say yeah terrible I mean I even said imagine you start dating a supermodel but she has a terrible personality how long does it take before you are miserable and yeah like three weeks so all right well I think you already agree with my point it's just a matter of exerting the self-control to focus on personality overlooks which I think you know both genders do it but it's especially bad for men C4 U and for both genders I was telling them things like you figure out these top priorities and then just downweight everything else be flexible and everything else for women I did have this advice of just go older so like like just go five 10 years older especially because a very common complaint for women is men my age are so immature all right well they don't have to be your age they could be five years older and you know you could go and find an immature guy and then hope to change him and he'll turn out and become a mature guy but a lot of guys never become mature if you get an older guy you can say well is he mature already no in that case no and if he is great I don't have to speculate about his future maturity because it's he's already there you know someone says look I can't possibly do that it's too gross it's like well what's the most you're willing to do yeah that's cool yeah I I see an awful lot of the an awful lot of the complaints from uh women who are struggling to find men that they think is sufficiently mature at their age and you see this in it it seems to be tied up in the data that there is a significantly bigger portion of 18 to 30 men who are single than 18 to 30 women who are single so I think women have already largely cottoned onto this again it fixes the tall girl problem of women out earning men socioeconomically because age is one of the biggest is predicted of wealth and if wealth is something that you need to offset all right we'll just give him a seven-year Head Start and there he is he's out ahead of you yeah I mean I think like another big difference I said well so for men I said look you just have to get get over your lack of confidence and ask right so that's important but but for women what I said is look it's true that you don't have to ask in order to get dates but you you do need to ask to get the guy you want probably I said like you know for women just to get a little bit more flexible on being willing to go and ask and I think for them I said look if you just feel Tongue Tied like especially for a woman just telling a guy you seem promising like oh my God like I hate you now like you told me I seem promising like like it's it's on the one hand like it is far from throwing yourself at a guy but same time I it is unambiguous I think I also mentioned like you know the sense of It's Always obvious what the other person wants so there's no need for me to tell them or it's always obvious what I want rather it's no need to tell them like just forget that nonsense people are not mind readers we have like we so greatly overrate other people's ability to read us because we're always thinking what we're thinking but we never get inside anyone else's head and and the idea that everyone secretly knows what it is you're thinking and they're just playing Dam especially if you're talking about the opposite sex especially if you're talking about the opposite sex we have no idea how the inside of your mind works yeah I uh I had a a pie we got some idea but I had a piece advice I was throwing around for a while about receptivity from women so a lot of women still have they feel like there's an additional lowering in status if they make the first move but there's this story you'll have heard of dropping a handkerchief that the ladies would have done in the sort of Renaissance period and the aristocracy would drop a handkerchief the gentleman would pick it up and that would be the beginning of the conversation like the modern equivalent of that is a gaze that lingers a little bit too long also women need to kind of adjust the sights of whatever they're shooting with to account for me too and concern that going to make a woman feel uncomfortable so there's an awful lot of sort of moving moving moving Parts here one of the other things that I quite enjoy before you move on so one of my big piece of advice to my daughter is never be afraid to play the I'm not one of those feminist cards with men oh yes okay so yeah and again this is one where of course I knew a lot of people would get get angry about it but I said look I'm not saying to go and denounce women or other I'm saying look just put people at ease if someone is nervous it is common sense and strategically wise just to go and smile and just say it's all cool don't worry I'm a decent person I don't prejudge you as being bad and I think that the I'm not one of those feminist cards is one of the best ones for women to play it really does distinguish you from women that men just feel like they have to walk on eggshells around to one where they will talk to you freely right it's great for work great for dating great for for actually making friends know the only thing that's holding people back is loyalty to this philosophical Dogma why do you think there's been a demonization of having children over the last few years it feels like this is kind of tied into a lot of feminist meta memes uh and meta cultures that's going on we've seen a decline in fertility rates what what do you think's going on with this demonization of specifically having kids I think that the demonization comes from a very narrow corner of mostly the internet the real story is not so much demonization as just apathy and disinterest uh it is true there is a demonization corner uh my younger son reads reddits all the time and he's saying okay dad like right the child-free people they're not that bad but the anti-natalist they're crazy the Indi naal the people who post videos of kids getting trampled by horses and stuff like that and like what right but I am familiar with philosophical anti-natalism I mean really does seem to heavily flow from the work of South African philosopher David benitar U and he came up with this argument that to my mind is truly bizarre you know like he has a number of arguments but the hardcore argument comes down to No One cons sense to be born because they can't because they don't exist yet and any everyone who exists will experience some suffering and even if that suffering is overwhelmingly out outweighed by by Joy still it is wrong to ever inflict suffering on anyone without their consent and therefore it's always wrong to have kids right and this argument has persuaded a strangely large number of people to my mind and you know my reply to this is so this implies the Good Samaritan is evil because you can't like how do you know that unconscious guy doesn't want to die you're going and administering first aid to a man who was beaten into senselessness but how do you know that he doesn't want to just bleed out it's like well there is this philosophical Doctrine called hypothe itical consent which normally is bogus because we can just ask you whether you consent but it is custom made for cases where like well he would probably consent if he was conscious but he can't similar you would probably consent to be born or to be conceived if you could but you can't but it's reasonable to presume it uh then there is a broader category of people just think that life isn't worth living epicurus answered this 2,500 years ago and his his reply just consisted in well we're in Greece there's cliffs don't like it jump off I have gotten you I I I got a threatening email from my University's mental health office for promoting suicide for saying stuff like this it's like look I'm not do you even understand what he University is about it's about thinking about things it's not like if that counts as promoting suicide to say epicurus said something and it and it's a good argument I don't know what you're doing on a University campus but I I I I'm familiar with benar one of my friends has podcasted with him albeit when he didn't have his screen on because he's still pseudonymous or largely Anonymous or whatever really but but he's known as a philosopher so but no one knows his face I don't think well he teaches at a university how can they know his face I don't know if he teaches under his real name I don't know whether that's a pseudonym I might be wrong anyway okay well anyway so check it for the show notes even if we even if we step ourselves a little bit away from the hardcore anti-natalist philos phers again you could maybe call it a generalized anti-child culture right and this is more toward the ambiguity uh that you mentioned about having kids this hyper individualism uh where do you think that comes from h i mean I think feminism definitely has something to do with it especially the idea that any woman that thinks that raising kids should be your first priority as an adult is just stupid and foolish and is sort of being a doormat to the patriarchy um I mean is striking to me that if there were a girl today in especially Suburban High School who said I just want to be a mom I think that the like the outcry against that would be overwhelming not because they hate the idea of having kids but because they elevate the idea of having a career as being the most important thing in life and kid as being an optional thing and I would think these are two both two extremely important things in life and yeah this is there's a trade-off of course right as a homeschooling dad who actually did all the night shift for all four my kids I can say yeah I probably would have one or two more books if I had no kids but I chose to be less successful as a professor so that I could go and have kids because that was more important to me and still is oh so there's a big uh there's a big mimetic element going on here with regards to Children ah so you know I mean I that's totally true I think that is a separate point but yes to a large degree well so I mean at least mically in in terms of imitating other people there's a conformist element El just the fact that we have baby booms and bus a lot of it seems to be that child you like you know the number of children that you want to have is based fairly heavily upon just what's normal in your culture or subculture so that's uh you you know one major factor going on which means you can sort of get a multiplied you can get a multiplied effect where if women there say women are focusing more on their careers that has a direct effect reducing fertility but it also has the indirect effect of it's now normal to have fewer kids which then means that even people not focused in their careers want to go and fit in uh I have worked quite a bit with the actual data of fertility and especially desire you know I think both uh accomplished and desired fertility and what's so like two big lessons that I like to trumpet so one is at least on American data it is that it is not true that income by itself leads to lower fertility in fact income by itself leads to higher fertility really what's going on is that education leads to lower fertility and so and if you rise education against income you see that that education reduces fertility and income increases it and the basic upshot of this is that the most fertile people are high income low education groups like say plumbers and on the other hand the least fertile groups are high education lowincome like say philosophers who drive a taxi all right so that's and once you put it this way you realize H so it isn't really the material element it's more of the social element of Education if we actually were teaching kids in school things like babies are D babies are gross babies are terrible David benitar has the right argument I don't know of any school that really does that it's more of you just teach people other priorities as being of overwhelming importance and then just like with problems if you talk about one problem all the time you are implicitly saying other problems don't matter and if you talk about only one life goal as being important all the time you're implicitly saying other life goals don't matter uh the other result that I think is very well let's see it's not surprising but it's really weth saying because it's the kind of thing people wouldn't want to say without data but I do have the data it's that women's education and women's income are much more important for determining the outcomes than the men's education income for both genders it's got the same direction but basically looks very much like women's preferences are a lot more important for the outcome which comes down to something like women have an actual definite opinion about how many kids they want to have men are more along for the ride and like oh you want to have three kids great want to have one kid great uh it's not quite that men don't have any preference at all and don't bargain or don't select but it really is more of the of the kind of decision that women uh women dominate in within the family is how many kids are we going to have right so right so say in terms of getting f up you got to change women's Minds that's more important generally a high income man married to a medium low education woman uh might be able to get this moving a little bit oh yeah I mean you by the way I also in my advice for men and women I say like you know find out how many kids they want early maybe not the first date but say by the third date like it's important thing to know yeah yeah the uh social desirability bias is something that I learned from you that you said is the most underrated effect in all of psychology and I I kind of can't stop seeing it now good explain it to people that aren't familiar simple idea when the truth sounds bad people lie and often the truth if the truth is said sufficiently and frequently people stop even being conscious about lying I mean really mundane examples are things like am fat there's only one acceptable answer to that oh Brian you look great you're wonderful you're beautiful just the way you are um we can see this in lots of different areas you can see it in things like church attendance more people claim they went to church than actually went to church more people claim to vote than actually vote U one of my favorite examples of all is there's actually a study of first of all you ask people would you abort a Down syndrome fetus and only about I think like 20 25% of people say they would say they would but then we see what what happens when people are actually in that situation and then it's more like 90% all right now again this doesn't necessarily mean that people were truly lying but they were just blurting out what sounded good without thinking about it until they needed to actually make a decision and then suddenly it's no longer just words I've go oh my God like I don't want to do that stated and revealed preferences are a hell of a drug oh yes that's quite right now I have a lot of applications of this some again as mundane as the the strange language of want to come to my party on Saturday oh I can't it's like hm well will you be in a cage will you be in the middle of Siberia unable to get to a plane in time what do you mean you can't and the answer is right fine I don't want to is the truth I say I can't in know because that sounds better even though it is um actually literally correct I won't yes I won't I when you come to my body I won't I won't yes I won't why why not because I don't because I have so there are things to do that would be better than that for me like what is that like sitting home watching TV that's better yeah often the answer uh but then I say there are many areas of life where social desability bias just becomes so overwhelmingly it's almost the only thing going on so I encourage people just to go and first of all read any political speech by politician they don't like and just go through the sentences one by one and say like could this possibly be literally true and I think you'll find wow like the politicians I don't like are lying all the time when pfac goes and says Trump lies like 70% of the time like no 99.9% is the correct number because you just read the sentence and it'll be sentences it'll be things like we're doing everything possible for this no you aren't if you're doing everything possible there you spend zero on anything else right so no wrong false and obviously so therefore a lie is that not uh part of just the imprecision of language and the fact that when we speak there is a degree of uh like Whimsy that kind of comes along for the ride interesting question yeah many people say all right well everybody knows it's not meant to be literally true I say actually it's the kind of thing where I think politicians are playing on the ambiguity of maybe it's literally true maybe it's not if they say this is an existential risk that's Putin's story about why they have to invade Ukraine it's an is existential risk comad all right and it's like now like when people hear this is everyone is all the supporters saying well obviously it's not really existential but like he's saying that to get people's attention or there are a whole lot of people who are actually believing it just like it's the truth from God's mouth and I think actually in politics there's a lot of people who are just taking it very naively and and so I do think it is a problem I think that it's not merely that you have to double the rhetoric to get the same result that you would have gotten if everyone spoke honestly I think rather there are just a lot of things that government does that if people were honest just wouldn't exist like like if people and during Co were to say look I'll you uh ra rather than saying look we're doing this to keep people safe they'd said we're doing this in order to reduce the number of fatalities from 1 million to 950,000 I think there' just be a lot less support for the measures if you if you were that honest about it it well that fundamentally comes down to is it useful or is it true right there are things that you can say that are useful the things that are true that become less useful and you go okay well what's the point of this communication is it to communicate the truth or is it to get the intended outcome yes although as soon as someone starts doing that then it's like wait useful for who useful for you to get power and hold it hm I wonder if that's something politicians care about as opposed to getting the best overall result for society doing careful cost benefit analysis after collecting the best possible statistics we could find even that though all the way down still ends up with lexical semantic [ __ ] and you know just it's trademark yeah precisely it's lexical semantic [ __ ] you heard it here first um because what people then start to do is they make lies of omish and than lies of Commish and they purposefully obfuscate not using words that allow them to be held up it's what happens in Law Courts it's so on and so forth well I didn't say you can't prove that it's necessarily not the case that precisely precisely yeah yeah it just it just becomes a game of of plausible deniability so I I think this is kind of the equivalent of the justification for performance-enhancing drugs legitimized Olympics I think just let let the gloves come off and lie as much as you want don't ever hold anybody to any account and just let it become a neural linguistic programming soup and just see who can make the best lies all the way down and let's see who wins then yeah I I I I confess to some slight like emotional sympathy but I think that you if you just look at the world and to see like you know the very worst governments in the world are the have the biggest lying demagogues um part of this I'll say is because whe these are almost always dictators and the dictator can just get away with bigger lies yeah yeah yeah you so like you know there there are just so many applications of social desirability bias one of my favorites actually is understanding what is the point of propaganda I'm a huge Orwell fan and if you read Orwell it sounds like the whole point of propaganda is just to tell like is is is basically to obscure the actual the actual truth and or basically to crush the truth or excuse me not propaganda censorship rather censorship so so you read Orwell it sounds like the whole point of censorship is that the government wants to crush the truth because they know that in the contest between the truth and a lie the LIE will be defeated so they have to go and imprison anyone anyone who speaks the truth nice story but here's the thing if you go and look at dictatorships say that they spend a lot more time crushing other lies than they do crushing the truth let you go to Saudi Arabia they're not that worried about the atheist saying like how do we know that the Quran is even true they're much more worried about amula saying Allah does not ordain the house of sad Allah ordains me those are the people that put fear into the hearts of a middle eastern islamist Tyrant because that person is saying a competing lie so the title of this essay is you monopolize the Pretty Lies point of censorship is say only I get to tell ridiculous lies anyone who says any other lies I will kill you I certainly think I remember Rob Henderson writing something about the goal of propaganda is not to control what you think it's to convince you of what other people think so it's basically a game of of you will through the abalene Paradox and through mimetic desire and through social desirability bias and so on you will end up doing what you think other people think so the goal is not actually to change your mind it's to change your mind about what you think of the people are thinking probably both but uh it's a good point yeah you know the abalene Paradox sounds really familiar but really good I learned I learned about it last week and now I can't I can't shut up about it's one where everybody is is it sort of like the can's beauty contest where you're trying to figure out what other people will think whoever other people think is the most beautiful person to to a degree yeah the abene Paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group's members because each member assumes the others approve of it it explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together think Emperor's New Clothes an acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want to attend you attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you there at a business meeting someone suggests an idea uh the making the influence of the face of the brand a trans influencer each member has misgivings about this but assumes that the others will consider them transphobic if they speak out so everyone approves the idea despite no one liking it or basically all of North Korea yes right I I I strong strongly suspect that you've you've got five or 10% True Believers in North Korea at least yes I think you I mean I also have no doubt that if you open the Border South Korea a large majority of the population would leave very quickly yeah yeah you had this other tweet that I loved from a while ago dear intellectuals if you ever decide you've been deeply wrong for years don't instantly Rebrand yourself as a wise spokesperson for your new view instead publicly admit that your judgment clearly isn't very good and stop pontificating for a few years why yeah it is inspired by a few particular people who remain nameless who did this bizarre transformation from I start off as the world's expert on this View and now that view is totally wrong and stupid and now I'm the expert on the other VI like well if it's totally wrong and stupid like what does that say about the fact that you held it for for 10 years I mean I just think that you again it's Lo while it's logically possible that a person could just see through the erors and become incredibly thoughtful about a new view I just think that it's highly unlikely and this is more of someone has either fame or money or both on the line and therefore they can't actually go through this honest period of Contrition where they just say gee like if I could be that right wrong what would be a what would be a hypothetical example of someone doing this hm I mean one of my favorite ones is all of the Rabid stalinists who deconverted and then quickly claimed to be the leading spokesman for anti-communism this is a big deal in the 40s and 50s a Whitaker Chambers comes to mind as one example let's see who else Sydney hook let's see there's a bunch of other ones uh let's see um think Max eatman as well right so you basically like you know like he was a trus but anyway but you know they they spend like years going and acting like Joseph stellon as a savior of mankind and then it's like oh but uh turns out he's a horrible mass murderer whoops okay now I'm gonna go and tell everybody how to be an anti-communist I mean on the one end like if you have specific things you've observed then fine say like I actually saw The Killing Fields so listen to me I was but but on the other hand to say but now I'm the expert on how anti-communism should work no I think we should probably listen to the people who never thought it was a good idea and were preent I mean I will say that I am I especially have it out for Whitaker Chambers who wrote a totally unfair review of ir Ran's Atlas Shrug here's someone who had who hated communism from her teenage years when she first encountered it never had a good word to say about it I think had a lot of insightful things to say about how horrible it was and then Whitaker Chambers has the nerve to call her a fascist in his review for National Review like like that guy you know you just want to say you know what you like there's a reason you became a stalinist which is that you don't have a correct attitude about how to think about ideas and how to treat other human beings it's the sort of performative empathy or I guess social desirability bias sort of wrapped up in a a world where your your words are more important than your Deeds which they certainly are now but they are basically at any distance right because we can't see what you're doing but we can read what you wrote or hear what you said um and yeah this has got spun up so much more recently where you see lizo you know is supposed to be this Champion for bigger bodied women but it turns out that she's fat shaming all of her dances backstage and making them eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers uh Ellen degenerous or I I have no knowledge of any of this I'll take your word for it I promise you it's true it promise you there's videos out there um and yeah my point being that it's often the people that proclaim the loudest about a thing that are the ones that are the worst uh people committing that that particular misgiving right this reminds me of a couple of other essays that I have I have one called you know could such a man care and it just starts with all right you go and you hear the official the official speeches of Kim jongan or Maduro and it's all about how I'm such a great compassionate person I love the people I have the poor I'm a champion and at the current stage in their career you're like yeah sure we know what you're really doing what you're up to but then you go back in time and realize there was some earlier period when they didn't have power and they couldn't really go and do horrible things and they were just but they were still going and expressing the same ideas Kim jong-un's not a good example because he's born into this but Maduro is a perfectly fine example but anyone who starts off as a non-politician an activist and then they eventually get it you can go and find what they originally saying and say all right well like and like you know one reaction is well obviously they were really corrupted by power or whatever but you know my reaction to this is look think about the nicest people that you know in real life could you imagine that they would become Mass murderers if you put them in charge I like like no like the nicest people I know like like they might they probably get overthrown or assassinated but they would not be ordering anyone to be killed they're just too nice to do that kind of thing and so when you look at someone who has power and they and they have all of this wonderful altruistic rhetoric and they had it for a long time and you say well they got corrupted no much better story is they were always terrible they were always the kind of person that was going and just telling people what they want to hear demagoguing exploiting social desirability bias to gain power and once you realize that it's like H the fact that people are saying this kind of Flowery altruistic talk there's a good reason to go and distrust those people because it's just so common for them when they get power to be terrible I love it Brian Kaplan ladies and gentlemen Brian where should people go they want to keep up to date with everything you're doing uh great question so all of my books uh so the main ones we talked about today were don't be a feminist as well as how evil or politicians and voters as mad scientists those are about all my books are available on Amazon these books of essays are real cheap just 12 bucks I haven't raised the price despite High inflation I also blog for bet on it and finally I still have a personal web page at bca.com awesome Ryan I appreciate you thank you fantastic being here it's been a lot of fun if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to [Music] subscribe