Modern Wisdom - #708 - Bryan Caplan - Is Feminism Changing For The Worse?

Episode Date: November 18, 2023

Bryan Caplan is an economist at George Mason University and author. Bryan wrote a letter to his young daughter encouraging her to not become a feminist. Which begs the question, why would a father not want this? In what ways are women being taken advantage of by an ideology, and how might Bryan be wrong? Expect to learn what trade offs feminism is making at the moment and why they're dangerous, why feminism does not like traditionally feminine roles, why there is so much of a lack of individual agency in the modern world, where the recent trend of demonising having children came from, why more people should not conform, how to think for yourself and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Brian Kaplan. He's an economist, a George Mason University, and an author. Brian wrote a letter to his young daughter, encouraging her to not become a feminist, which begs the question, why would a father not want this? In what ways are women being taken advantage of by an ideology and how might Brian be wrong? Expect to learn what trade-offs feminism is making at the moment and why they're dangerous, why feminism does not like traditionally feminine roles, why there is so much of a lack of individual agency in the modern world, where the recent trend of demonizing having children came from, why more people should not conform how to think for yourself and much more.

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That's 20% off and free shipping at manskate.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Protect your browsing online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. If you are using the internet without a VPN, you are basically dancing in a muddy field without any shoes on. It is not good for you. If you use a public Wi-Fi network like a library or a cafeteria,

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That's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Brian Kaplan. 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. 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 jujitsu. your newspaper truth and then if someone disagrees with you say, oh, you're against truth. Right. Okay. So it's a lexical Brazilian jujitsu. Yes. Right. I understand. Why you're not a fan of it. You wrote a book for your 10-year-old daughter called Don't Be a Feminist.

That is correct. I mean, honestly, it just comes down to the empirics. Is it really true that our society generally treats men more fair than women? What I did in the essay just go over all of the main complaints the people have to this effect and try to see does the evidence really hold up? 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, the treatment that got into the performance. I hear as 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 these 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 of course, as well as just your priorities

in life, is the job, the top priority in your life, or there are 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. 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 are they comparing, body count?

Ah, no, you know, things more like, you know, how good is their romantic life for 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 actress is likely an article to Caprio just going from with regards to what? The mating success? Yeah, yes. 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 a 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 and much more likely to be in suicide, much more likely to be homeless, much more likely to be in cells 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, you know, if anything based upon normal ideas of insurance, the group that has the smaller spread is the advantage group. What do you mean when you say small spread and biggest spread? Well, for things like you are less likely to be far from average. So for example, high 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 overrepresented in Nobel prizes, in being best-selling authors, in being famous composers. That's all true. As well, while we're at it, how about we go and take a look to see whether men are also overrepresented among homeless, among suicides, among the unemployed? You know, long-y- also, 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, by those measures, they're overrepresented among those doing worst. I'm going to guess that if you did a guinea, genie coefficient for men, you would have a higher inequality on pick whatever outcome it is that you want life span health span happiness mental IQ income body counts. Yeah, so body counts probably the main exception because there are Brostitude who just have enormous numbers of partners They probably increased the inequality for women right all of your other ones, right? Thank very good and by the way You know 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. Like let's think about the individual facts of the individual cases and maybe your theory of work eight times out of 10. Someone who thinks the theory works a thousand times out of a thousand. It's like, yeah, that 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 and their sense of their own 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 where side states probably at least near its all-time peak. Turns what's going on here is my story. I think there's 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. I think that you can read almost 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. Same thing in mythology. This is just a general human attitude that murdering man is like, well, you know, maybe had it coming, but Mercury women, that is something that it is just a deeply rooted feeling and 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 balancing instead of other attitudes or it can just be hypocrisy and it doesn't get that bad as it gets implemented, but once it becomes 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 single-minded devotion. Yeah, 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 stories. Women are a wonderful effect. Yes. New stories that proclaim the successes of women seem to be treated more favorably than ones that 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? Unless it's like a homeless guy getting a job, but it's very hard to even picture what these stuff, what these stories are. I can't really get them. Yeah, so two things that I think are interesting here. First one being, I 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 warring tribe, you know, I learned about the cultural history of how relationships have evolved from a sort of culturally mimetic 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, it's a wheezy, it's a wheezy, it's a, whether you tribe were taking over the old one. So there's some, again, it's not 1,000 times out of 1,000 thing. Right, I mean, there I would point out that the usual story is we first murder all the men

and then we enslaved the women Which is terrible, but stills like well, which one would you rather be? Yeah, I'd rather be enslaved and murdered probably. The ones that you're enslaved by. Yes, that there is a little bit of that, although there's also because there are suicide opportunities in case it turns out to be worse. Definitely, my preferences enslaved me first and then I will be looking for my way out it turns out to be more horrible than death itself.

On the question of the legal treatment of women, of course, most of this is in the pre-modern 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, fathers just legally and tighter to murder any of the children, regardless of their gender. Now, once you hear that, it's like, well, but they weren't actually doing it.

It's 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 actually, 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, I couldn't possibly say no to her, she was crying. I think that, again, there are human universals, and wow, there 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 you're always whining, the emotion of whining and complaining. Yeah, I mean, you think that started after of whining and complaining. Yeah, I mean, you think that started after

because the law changed. So people have always been doing these kinds of things. And again, just the way that if you read the literature 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, they love their daughters, They love their sons. And then on top of this, this

is this is very basic human feeling that women suffering is especially important. 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. It was like, hmm, yeah, don't the fathers and sons lose more because they're dead. Yeah. Well, are you familiar with Gamma Bias? Have you heard this before?

Let's see. Maybe under it. So is it like not caring much about the lowest status people? Or what is it? It's specifically men. So Dr. John Barry's Center for Male Psychology came up with this. It's really interesting insight.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it. If there is a story which is pro-female, it will sex the person. If it's pro-male, it will dissect it. If it's anti-male, it will sex the person. If it's anti-female, it will dissect it. So, you end up with a skew. So, for instance, why is it called the gamer? I don't know. You'd have to ask him. He 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. 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, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So for instance, Sarah Everard was this young woman walking through a park in the UK. She was killed by a male police officer. Absolutely terrible, right? And there was a lot of protests about women don't feel safe in these streets. It was a flashpoint for sort of sex relations. One week later, a man drowned jumping into the river Thames 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 a 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, mometetically, 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 sanitized, new version of something that could talk about women's issues? Hmm. 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, for instance, I know that you've got

some views on circumcision. I think I align pretty much with your views on that. That's a very particular wing of male disadvantage, right? Looking at, is there a way that we can get women to become mothers and then get them back into the workforce? That's a very specific element of this. So would you try and make everything quite sort of disparate and have, okay, we're gonna have

an employment for mothers department and we're gonna have a, we need to not circumcise our children department. Hmm, I mean that, pat your head and rub your belly thing is quite striking because it's, of course, a lot of people can't do that. 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 as I should go and get some of the attention that other issues are getting. Usually you're a little hazy about what issues you wanna de-epicize. 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, not to go and emphasize it

and not to go and prioritize it. 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 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 warning my daughter about in the essay, which first of all, and tipathy of just being angry at a bunch of other people who really are not even responsible, or at least most of them are not, and then self-pity of just feeling like a victim. So I say, like, you don't want to have a philosophy that encourages and tip of the yourself pity. Human nature already naturally does weigh too much of both of these. It is better to go and try to free yourself of entity and self-pity than it is to foster them or create a whole philosophy that justifies them. I mean, 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 the 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 mostly, like the life is not perfectly fair, but it's not an issue primarily of, or even,

according to the evidence, it's 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 to say, or any kind of course of an individual says I'm being treated unfairly, my normal advice is, like, is the person you're dealing with at all open reason? And it's like, well, no, if they were,

we're already talked about it like, well, you probably need to get away from that person. Right, or unless there's some other more, you know, person above that person that's open to reason. 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

has impacted up. What do you think are the trade-offs 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? That's a good question. And in a way, it's sort of reinforces my point that we especially care about women suffering. The arguments against feminists and the most acceptable are the ones 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. I mean. In terms of what's going on, so I think

at the individual level, the main issue is just promoting negative attitudes of antipathy and self-pity. When 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. My advice is, if you want to do well in the world, go and make as many friends as you can, especially friends with people that are positioned to go and help you. And the way that you make friends is by being friendly to them and having a positive and

constructive attitude. So when I say like, and typathy gets in the way of that and typathy 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, you know, self-pity is really baked into human nature. Like you never need to encourage it.

There's just so much self-pity. Poor me. I don't have the latest iPhone. There's totally human nature to feel that way. So like, really what you need to focus on is everything that 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'd say that the other big effect of just mistreating men. Which again is not going to

only say, wait, we're mistreating men. Well, who cares about them? Like, yeah, that's the attitude that I'm saying is a terrible attitude. It's bad to be unjust to men. You should not be done just to anyone. The fact of their men doesn't mean that it's okay and that whatever happens to them too bad. Like, this is the payback for 2000 years of them mistreating us. It's like, was that true, either? So there's that. In, you know, we didn't know, in terms of sort of like collective harm, you know, there's, there is a lot of work on things like discrimination law saying that if people are worried that you're going to

sue them, this is a reason for them to know how you're in the first place. I think that there's definitely something going on there and it's something to consider in terms of whether just just set discrimination law in general benefits women though on, on balance, it still might, but it's a benefit that is based upon deep injustice. Wow, okay, yeah, so the widespread, litigious nature of women, especially being super vigilant for potential

mistreatment in the workplace could cause some employers to look at a woman and think, she looks like she's got a good solicitor. That's not higher in case something occurs down the line. Yeah, I mean, I know, uh, go on. Oh, yeah. I mean, so probably one of the best examples where I think it is true that women were hurt by MeToo specifically is there is a couple of papers showing that mentorship crashed after MeToo. Yep, that's amazing.

And that is obviously beneficial to women to go and get extra training from someone, but strikingly, the main feminist response to this was, we will not tolerate this reaction. We will, we will, we will, it is totally ridiculous to go and penalize us because of this irrational fear that you might get sued. And we just need to go and tell men that this is not acceptable. And it's, hmm, yeah, well, this is a situation where they're going to totally agree and then probably keep doing what is that? Not how you in any case.

That's for that board. Yeah. You know, hiring is one where it's formal and so it's easier to litigate. But mentorship is informal and anything informal is very hard 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 I'm feeling here is on on average, of course, there is I emphasize everything is on average. That's fine. The entire podcast is on average. Excellent. What I'm feeling here is an echo. I'm sensing the equivalency on the male side of the spectrum, which I'm sure that you've seen movements like the black pill movement,

in cell ideology, stuff like that. I have a number of friends that are very deep into the research with this. 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 sort of forgotten monster energy marinated in cells, but there is an awful lot of self-pity, there is an awful lot of antipathy within these groups toward the opposite sex.

So this isn't necessarily 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 outgrew. Yes, absolutely. So I have been actually doing compare and contrast, the insell 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 feminist, they often say,

Brian, you're just repeating in cell talking points. I'm like, no, 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 and tip of the in-self pity. What I would say is that the in-sales that you sow despise, they really are the marriage of you, and I think of myself as being someone who's just trying to fairly arbitrate between two unreasonable groups. arbitrarily arbitrate between two unreasonable groups. And of course to go and say that women 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.

But also there are some specific male complaints that are true. And then like, of course, like the more you read them, the more you realize, well, look, people just need to tolerate some level of unfairness and society because otherwise people will barely be able to breathe. It's like, yeah, and that goes both ways. Do you remember Scott Aronson's description of his experience? Probably 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 blog post after that.

I think this is really instructive. For the record, so I'm good friends with Scott Ayrnsin, I've hung out with him a lot in Texas, but I also have read the pieces. So I will claim to have some inside knowledge of the situation, although filtered through his perspective, but I trust Scott, I trust both scots, but I especially trust Scott Ayrnsin, who I know well personally. So Scott Ayrnson did a piece for his blog, Sheddle Optimized, where he, and this is barely even a caricature of it.

He said, look, I'm 98% agree with feminism. Like, I'm so unborn, I care so much, but I just want to say one thing, which is that when I was a teenager, I was almost suicidal, where I 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, hopefully, hopeless effort to go and find a girlfriend was wrong, thought that anything that I might do or say would be harassment, and eventually learn better. But anyway, it'd be nice if in the midst of fighting actual injustices against women, you could just go and show a little bit of sympathy,

a little bit of understanding for shy male nerds like myself, especially when they're young, and they just don't have much experience, and they don't understand what's going on. self, especially when they're young and they just don't have much experience and they don't understand what's going on. And then the feminist reaction to this was generally hysterical calling him a rapist or an insipient rapist entitled. Yes. Yes, entitled. You think that you have a right to sex and it's like he didn't say any of those things.

He like, rather what he said is, you know, I pledged 98% of what you say is true and I just have a few slight doubts and you just be a little bit nicer. That's it. And for that, like the reaction was so absurd and insane. And it is the one where you just look at that and you say, like, you know, this is a cult of fanatics he's talking about. I did get a chance actually to tell Scott, like, do that really make you rethink

that whole 98% thing? I'm not gonna repeat Scott's answer, but I definitely did Haslow about that. See, how about we go down more to like 5% from 98? Can we do that? Look, so here's the thing that I think is a, the inevitable ping pong game that occurs happening. And I saw this with Melissa Carney,

who came on the podcast recently, she wrote a book called The Two Parent Privilege, How America Stop Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, something like that. She is a policy wank from Washington, DC, and I tried in the episode to push her beyond just what is the data telling us to, what is the implication, and maybe even what is the cause of this,, 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? She's written this big book about things, but she very much kind of defined the rules of play of where she wasn't gonna get out over her skis with regards to this.

And I was like, I wish that she'd just bro-science to way through stuff, because it's funny, but what she did was she decided I'm gonna hold myself within this sort of, within my realm of expertise. And I was like, that's a pretty good indication of somebody detacting in good faith with a lot of experts 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, 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 happened 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 radicalized to one side or another side of some sort of aisle, 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'm gonna go with the group that accepts me. I'm not gonna keep on trying to work. Here's 98% of my entire world going toward you, group that says that you despise me

and I'm entitled more on in-sell or something like that. So, I'm a rapist for like a rapist in his heart. It's like straight out of the New Testament. Original sin. So yeah, just my point being that, you know, I see here, especially the antipathy, it creates this ever escalating cycle that spins up and up and up and up, and people become more virulent in their distaste and their lack

of ability to see the other sides issue. And this is how you have, you know, two groups of people largely just talking past each other. Yeah, I mean, I only 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 either the blue tribe or the red tribe as we call them confusingly here in the US. Obviously, so with every other country the world red equals left, but somehow on the US red equals right.

You got the wrong way around. Yes. And then blue, I don't know the what it's like the side of the road that you drive on, you got it the wrong way around. Yes, but where the. I think like we're at least close to the only hunter that has this color scheme, but yeah, but anyway Yeah, so that you face Might a lot of sense. I mean you're thinking we're mentioning and then you know the Scott Ayronson 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 Ayronson and Saying yes, like there is this group of shy mill nerds who want to talk to women. They're not very good at it. It doesn't mean that they have any horrible, any, any horrible plans. So they're like, they're very, usually very nice people. It's just that they don't really know how to talk to women. 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? So I think it's 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. So, you know, like imagine if there was some kind of mandatory pick pocket training,

where they bring in all the workers and they say, pick pocketing is wrong, don't pick pocket others. Pick pocketing others means reaching into their pockets without remission and taking their stuff and then keeping it. Don't be a pick pocket, all right? And it's like, okay, why are you telling me this though? Like, I know all this already. This is all quite obvious. And yet to me, this is very much what most sensitivity

training 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 why? Well, a lot of it is, it really just seems to be, humiliate you to say, look, we're going to talk to you like children and you have to sit there and suck it up tough luck. 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 pick pocket is they don't, they know whenever 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 pick-bocketing,

where it's like, well, you looked at what was in someone's pocket without their consent, that's a kind of pick-bocketing. So 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 is to go and make fun of various training that you'll see especially in college campuses about sexual harassment.

It's like, don't sleep with your students. Oh, I didn't know we weren't supposed to do that. Oh, thank you. I'm like, come on. Like, we all know this. Like, 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 knowing they want. So, again, if it really an issue of something that's really confusing, be a different story, so maybe actually the internet's 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 fail on the right you test.

Right. Yeah. It makes sense. So one of the things that we're both fans of is 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 in 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 an agentic individual.

Oh yeah, that's a great point. I mean, yeah, because like, well, what I like to tell people is imagine a person who has the absolute maximum reason to feel on the tip of the inselvedity. Like someone who was stabbed in the back and now they're paralyzed and they know the person who did it, you know,

like it, I don't know, it was like your ex-wife stab you in the back, now you're paralyzed and they know the person who did it, you know like you I don't know it was like your ex-wife stab 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 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 antivathy be full of self-bitty? 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 understand why you would be overwhelmed with intimately self-pity,

but you gotta get past that because if you're going to have any enjoyment out of life, if you're gonna be able to salvage any part of what you're hoping for, you're gonna have to go and focus on what you can do and what you can have now and just being angry at the woman who did this to you and feeling sorry for you, 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 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 and improvement.

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, 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 say that philosophically, it's easier to go and just realize a philosophy is wrong than to

get rid of all the negativity that the philosophy has inspired. 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. But still, I would say, all right, well, just 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, we 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. Well, like another good baby step is hang out more with people

who do not feel so much centipity in self-pity, so that your new peer group is encouraging you to improve instead of holding you back. Yeah, I think 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 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 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 philosophical worldview comes in quite importantly. Is this happening to me? Did I get to choose this? There's a study which I'm sure you've seen about two rats are in 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 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 being able to take your sense of control, your locus of control being internal

is a very, very large part of life. And I mean, what's interesting about that to me is that I actually have a moderate mocus 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 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 at that time and it's, you know, you could have had to do it. You're all hosted by your own rationality.

Yeah. So, but you know, like, it's also like, you know, 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 going to do that stuff. This has remind me of one of my favorite movies. I hope this isn't 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. Have you ever seen it by any chance? No. The basic plot is that there is a dad of, you know, there's a family. There's a mom and dad, I think it's four daughters, and the dad runs off of the secretary and just disappears and abandones 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 we do her and the daughters 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 he had 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, 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 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 RFK Jr. about three months ago when

he was in Austin. There was a bunch of different people there, a lot of interesting people. One of them was Tim Kennedy, who's a green beret. You might know, he lives in Austin. He does a sort of self-defense thing called sheep dog response. Tim Kennedy was open carrying as he does because that's, that's, he's a, ex-

Wait, do you say Tim Kennedy? Yes. So wait, is he, is he also a Kennedy? Actually, different, different Kennedy. I was getting confused by the story. UFC fighter, Green Beret, anyway, 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.

Turns outside, right? But no security inside. And I would remember looking at the gun on 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 the 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 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 re-changed. 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 self for that that can kind of start to give people a little bit of perspective, like you can inact 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 their lives and how to raise their locusts of control. 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. Now that itself comes down to locusts of control. Well, I am stuck with people's company I don't enjoy. And I said, well, you're not really stuck with them. You may say you're stuck with them, but you could go and try. Go through your mental role, Dex, the people you 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 last, and you could just turn down the dial a bit. You don't need to start purging your grandma because she is a big mouth. You could just see her half as often. But I would think of that as actually itself, you have an only touching on locus control because you're telling them to go and take actions in order to go and make them sell happier. So I guess I would probably start there. In terms of just saying, look, 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 locus of control. Right? So, 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 nothing's going to happen, of course, you can almost certainly wait to be saved.

Someone said, oh, I'm going to save you. What were the important differences between men finding death soulmate and women finding death soulmate? Let finding death 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? Everyone's at the out terrible. I mean, I even said, imagine you start dating a supermodel,

but she's a terrible personality. How long does it take before you are miserable? And yeah, like three weeks. 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 over looks, which I think, you know, both genders do it, but it's especially bad for men.

See, for, for both genders, I was telling them things like, you know, figure out these top priorities and then just down the way to everything else, be flexible and everything else. For women, I did have this advice of just go older. So, like, just go five or ten years older, especially because a very common complaint for women is men my age or 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 already there. Now, 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 see an awful lot of the complaints from women who are struggling to find men that I think is sufficiently mature at their age. And you see this in, 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 cotton onto this. Again, it fixes the tall girl problem of women out earning men's social economically because age is one of the biggest predictors 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 that I said, well, so for men, I said, look, you just have to get over your lack of confidence and ask, right? So that's important. Anybody about it? For women, what I said is, look, it's true that you don't have to ask in order to get dates,

but you do need to ask to get the guy you want probably. So he said they're like, 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, you're like, especially for women

just telling you that you seem promising. Like, oh my God, like I hate you now. Like you told me I seem promising. Like it's, it's like, on the one hand, be like it is far from throwing yourself at a guy, but same time, I think 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. We're always obvious what I want rather. There'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. I know the idea that everyone secretly knows what it is you're thinking and they're just plain dumb. 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 had a... Oh, we got some idea, but...

I had a bunch of advice I was throwing around for a while about receptivity from women. So, a lot of women still have... They feel like there is an additional lowering in status if they make the first move. But, does this story... You'll have heard of dropping a handkerchief that the ladies would have done in the sort of Rene Sons 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 men's concern that they're 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. So yeah, and again, this is one really, of course, like, I knew a lot of people would get it get angry about it But I should look I'm not saying to go and denounce women or otherwise. 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 free They I just great for work great for dating great for me for actually making friends

I'm 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 and meta cultures that's going on. We've seen a decline in fertility rates. What do you think is 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.

It is true. There is a demonization corner. My younger son reads, red it's all the time and he's saying, okay, dad, like, right, the child free people, they're not that bad. But the anti-natalists, they're crazy. The anti-natalists, the people 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, it really does seem to heavily flow from the work of South African philosopher, David Benatar. 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 consents to be born because they can't, because he don't exist yet. And everyone who exists will experience some suffering. And even if that suffering is overwhelmingly outweighed by joy, still, like, 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. I mean, 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 in administering first aid to a man who was beaten in decently. But how do you know that he

doesn't want to just lead out? It's like, well, there is this philosophical doctrine called hypothetical 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. Similarly, he would probably consent to be born or to be conceived if you could, but you can't, but it's reasonable to resume it. Then there is a broader category of people to think that life is worth living. Epicurus answered this 2,500 years ago, and his reply just consisted in, well, we're

in Greece, there's cliffs. Don't like it jump off. I have gotten, I got a threatening email from my university's mental health office for promoting suicide for saying stuff like this. It's like, I'm not, do you even understand what university is about? It's about thinking about things. Like, if that counts as promoting suicide to say Epicurus said something and it's a good argument, I don't know what you're doing on a university campus.

But I am familiar with Benatar. One of my friends is podcasted with him, albeit when he didn't have his screen on because he's still pseudonymous or largely anonymous or whatever. Really? But he's known as a philosopher, so. Like no one knows his face.

I don't think. We teach his at a university. How can that 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. Well, anyway, so you can check it for the show notes.

Even if we, even if we step ourselves a little bit away from the hardcore anti-natalist philosophers, again, you could maybe call it a generalized anti-children culture, right? And this is more toward the ambiguity that you mentioned about having kids, this hyper-individualism. Where do you think that comes from? Hmm, I mean, I think feminism definitely has something to do with it, especially the idea that any woman that thinks that raising kids to be your first priority as an adult is just stupid and foolish

and is sort of being a doormat to the patriarchy. I mean, it's 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 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 the kid as being an optional thing. And I would think of these are two, both two extremely important things in life. And yeah, there's a trade-off, of course. As a homeschooling dad who actually did all

the night shifts for all for my kids, I can say, yeah, I probably would have one or two more books if I didn't know 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, there's a big mimetic element going on here with regards to children. Mm-hmm. So that, I mean, that's totally true. I think that is a separate point, but yes,

to a large degree, I mean, it leads them medically in terms of imitating other people. There's a conformist element. You're just the fact that we have baby booms and busts. A lot of it seems to be that child, you know, like 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, you know, one major factor going on, which means you can sort of get a multiply, you can get a multiplied effect, where if

women, women, there's, let's say women are focusing more on their careers, that has a direct effect reducing fertility, but it also is the indirect effect of, it's now normal to have fewer kids, which then means that even people are not focusing on their careers, want to go and fit in. I have worked quite a bit with the actual data of fertility, and especially, I think both accomplished and desired fertility,

and what's, you know, so like two big lessons that I like to trump it. So one is, at least in American data, 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 race education against income,

you see 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 low income, like, say, philosophers who drive a taxi. All right, so that's it.

And once you put it this way, you realize, hmm, 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, babies are gross, babies are terrible. David Benatar 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 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 is being important all the time, you're implicitly saying other life goals don't matter. The other result that I think is very, well, let's see, it's not surprising, but it's really we're saying because it's kind of thing people wouldn't want to say without data, but I do have the data.

It's that women's education, 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 it 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. You want to have

one kid great. 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 kind of decision that women, women dominate within the family is how many kids are we going to have? Right. So, right. So, in terms of getting fertility up, you've got to change women's minds. That's more important generally a high income man married to a medium low education woman Might be able to get this moving a little bit. Oh, yeah I mean, you know, by the way, I also in my advice for moon women I say like you find out on me kids they want early

Maybe not the first date, but say by the third date, it's important thing to know. Yeah, the social desirability bias is something that I learned from you that you said is the most underrated effect in all of psychology, and 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, the truth is said sufficiently and frequently, people stop even being conscious

about lying. I mean, really mundane examples are things like M.I. fat. There's only one acceptable answer to that. Oh, Brian, you look great. You're wonderful. You're beautiful that is the way you are. We can see this in lots of different areas. You can see things like church attendance.

More people claim they went to church than actually went to church. More people claim to vote than actually vote. One of my favorite examples of all is there's actually a study. 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, but then we see 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 gone, oh my God, like I don't want to do that. Stayed in revealed preference as 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 strange language of, want to come to my party on Saturday, oh, I can't. So, hmm, 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, you know, because that sounds better, even though it is actually literally correct. I won't.

Yes, I won't. I don't want to be come to my body. I won't. I won't, yes. I won't. Why? Why not? Because I have, there are things to do that would be better than that for me. Like what is that? Like sitting on watching TV. That's better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I say there are many areas of life where social and

disability bias just becomes so overwhelmingly it's almost the only thing going on. So I encourage people 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 put a fact 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 the sentence is, will be things like, we're doing everything possible for this. No, you aren't. If you're doing everything possible, you spend zero on anything else.

Right. So, no, wrong, false. And obviously so, therefore, a lie. Is that not a part of just the imprecision of language and the fact that when we speak, there is a degree of 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 the 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 existential risk. That's Putin's story about why they have to invade Ukraine. It's an existential risk, come around. And it's like, now, when people hear this, is everyone roll, is there all the supporters saying, well, obviously it's not really existential, but it's like he's saying that we 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 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 a people and going to COVID would say, look, rather than saying, look, we're doing this to keep people safe.

They 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're, if you were that honest about it. It, well, that fundamentally comes down to, is it useful or is it true? There are things that you can say that are useful, that 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 what soon as someone starts doing that, then it's like, what useful for who? Useful for you to get power and hold it. 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 fuckery. And, you know, just, it's trademark. Yeah, precisely, it's lexical semantic fuckery. You heard it here first. Because what people then start to do is they make lies of omission rather than lies of commission.

They purposefully obfuscate not using words that allow them to be held up. It's what happens in law courts, it's at so and so forth. Well, I didn't say that we're necessarily not the case that precisely. It's possible that. Yeah, it just it just becomes a game of plausible deniability. So I think this is kind of the equivalent of the justification for a performance enhancing drugs, the legitimized, the limpics.

I think just 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 neuro-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 Confess to some slight emotional sympathy, but I think that you know if you just look at the world and to see like you know The very worst governments in the world are the of the biggest line demagogues Part of this I'll say is because when are almost always dictators, the dictators just get

away with bigger lies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, there are just so many fun applications of social desirability bias. One of my favorites actually is understanding what is the point of propaganda? I'm a huge or well fan, and if you read or well, it sounds like the whole point of propaganda is just to tell, it's basically to obscure the actual truth and we're basically to crush the truth.

I'm not probably gonna censorship, rather, censorship. 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 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. If 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 Amulah saying, you know, 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 Islam as tyrant, because that person is saying a competing lie. So the title that says, 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, you will, through the Abilene paradox and through memetic 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 it's a good point. Yeah, you know, the Abilene 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. It's one where everybody is, is it sort of like the Canes beauty contest where you're

trying to figure out what other people will think, whoever other people think is the most beautiful person? Two, two degree yet. The Abilene paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the size of the group's members, because each member assumes the others approve of it. It explains how a number of accurate individuals can be comedied so when they get together, think emperors, new clothes. An acquaintance invites you to his wedding, despite not wanting you there because he thinks he wants to attend, you attend, despite not wanting to, because you think he wants you there. At a business meeting, someone suggests an idea

of making the influence of the face of the brand or 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 strongly suspect that you've got 5% or 10% true believers in North Korea at least. Yes, I think I also have no doubt that if you open the border of 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 yours, 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? It is inspired by a few particular people who remain nameless who did this bizarre transformation from I'm start off as the world's expert on this view and now that views totally wrong and stupid but I'm the expert on the other view like well if it's totally wrong and stupid what does that say about the fact that you held it for 10 years? I mean, I just think that you, again, it's a lot, while it's logically possible that a person could just see through the errors 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 decide, gee, like, I can be that wrong. What would be a hypothetical example of someone doing this? One of my favorite ones is all of the rabbit downists who de-converted and then quickly claimed

to be the leading spokesman for anti-communism. This is a big deal in the 40s and 50s. de-converted and then quickly claimed to be the leading spokesman for anti-communism. This is a big deal in the 40s and 50s. 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. Let's see. I mean, you think Max Eastman as well.

So, you basically, he was a troskiist, but anyway. They spend years going and acting like Joseph Stalin is a savior of mankind. And then it's like, oh, but turns out he's a horrible mass murderer. Whoops. OK, now I'm going to go and tell everybody of how to be an anti-communist.

On the one hand, if you have specific things you've observed, then fine. Say, I actually saw the killing fields. So listen to me. I was about to put. But on the other hand, to say, but now I'm the the killing fields. So listen to me, I was, 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 people who never thought it was a good idea and I will say that I am, I especially have it out for Whitaker Chambers who wrote a totally unfair review

of Iran's Atlas Shrod. Here's someone who hated communism from her teenage years when she first encountered it. Never had a good word to say about it. I think a lot of insightful things to say about a horrible it was. And then Whitaker Chambers has the nerve to call her a fascist in his review for National Review. It's like that guy. I mean, I just wanna say, you know what?

There's a reason it became a stoneist, which is that you don't have a correct attitude about how to think about ideas and how to treat other human beings. Hmm. It's the sort of performative empathy or I guess social desirability by a sort of wrapped up in a world where 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're sure. And yeah, this has got spun up so much more recently, where you see Lizzo 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 the meat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers, Ellen DeGeneres. I have no knowledge of any of this. I'll take your word for it. I promise you it's true. I promise you there's videos out there. And yet my point being that it's often the people that proclaim the loudest about a thing

that are the ones that are the worst 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, this special speech is of Kim Jong-un or Maduro, and it's all about how I'm such a great compassionate person. I love the people 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 is not a good example because he's born to this, but Maduro is a perfectly fine example. But anyone who starts off as a non-politician and activist and then they eventually get it, you can go and find what they originally saying and say, well, one reaction is well obviously, they were really corrupted by power or whatever. My reaction to this is, look,

think about the nicest people that you know in real life. Can you imagine that they would become mass murderers? If you put them in charge, I was like, no! The nicest people I know, 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 have all of this wonderful, altruistic rhetoric and they had it for a long time and you say, well, they got corrupted. Now, much better story is they were always terrible. They're always the kind of person that was going and just telling people what they want to hear, demagogue, and exploiting social zirability by us to gain power. And once you realize that, it's like, hmm, 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, why should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you're doing. Great question. So all of my books, so the main ones we talked about today were, I don't be a feminist as well as how evil are politicians and voters as mad scientists. Those are 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 webpage at BeCaplem.com. Awesome. Ryan, I appreciate you. Thank you. Fantastic being here. It's been a lot of fun. you