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Good morning, John. A couple of things. First, the awesome Socks Club window is open. It's open for only eight more days. You can sign up for the awesome Socks Club or the awesome Undies Club. We also have like special deals that are like lowered prices for a bunch of stuff, including signing up for exactly 12 months and then it auto cancels, which is a great gift to give someone else for Christmas or to give yourself. But in order to keep things efficient, in order to keep costs down, we only open up these clubs during very limited windows once or twice a year, and right now the window is open and it's going to be closing in a week. So if you would
like to buy socks or underwear in literally the best way that exists because all of the profit goes to expand healthcare access to the people in the world who need it the most, and also we found the best underwear and socks and the best underwear and sock designers, and it's all very high quality and good looking, you can go to the link in the description. Second thing, this video from now on will contain the bad word that is in the title a lot. Hopefully that's not too much of a surprise, but we don't tend to curse here on Vlogbrothers, but this video is an exception. All right, John. So there used to be this breakfast place in my neighborhood, and I miss it very much, but it was always very busy, and the way
that it worked was there was a counter that you would order at, you'd wait in line, and then there were places to sit, but there were never enough places to sit. So it was always a little nerve-racking waiting in line hoping that a table might open up in time for you to like eat at it. But then, occasionally, someone would come in, and before ordering, before even waiting in line, someone would get up and they'd put their jacket down on the table like they were going to keep that table for themselves, even though other people who had already ordered were clearly waiting for a table. Now, John, this is a small thing and also perhaps like a place-specific behavior, but it is such
a good way to outline what I think of as like a unified theory of behavior. Claiming a table in a crowded restaurant before you're going to sit at it is behavior, and I think that I can tell you exactly why. Now, people have actually done like philosophical work to define what an is. Aaron James, a philosophy professor at UC Irvine, wrote a book on and I haven't read it, but I read a synopsis, and he talks about people who repeatedly grant themselves special advantages in our otherwise cooperative And for him, they have to be doing it out of a sense of entitlement and usually they're pretty immune to the complaints of others. I like this, but I think there's sort of a more like economic argument to be made about the specific entitlement that people are
granting to themselves. Not so much about the person. I don't need to know how they feel about the way they're behaving, but about the behavior itself. So here it is. My unified theory of behavior. behavior is getting something for yourself in a way that costs the world more than you gain. John, imagine a hypothetical world where you and I are both waiting for a table at the Hobnob Cafe and one clears up. If I immediately lay my jacket down on that table, that was perhaps discourteous, but we've both already ordered. Our food is on the way. I could have kindly offered the table to you, but this was a zero sum situation. You lost, I gained.
Somebody was going to have to win. On the other hand, if you lay down your jacket on the table even though you're currently in line, then that gives you the gain of the table eventually. But in the meantime, it ensures that table can serve no other patron during the time that you are in line. The restaurant's overall capacity has been diminished. If every person does that the moment they walk in, more tables spend time empty, which isn't just a trade-off from one person to another. It's a subtraction of value. It's bad for the whole restaurant. You have eliminated more value from the world than you have gained for yourself. This is behavior. I once heard a successful stand-up comedian. This is it's public. You can find it, but this
person is not well thought of anymore anyway. But he was telling the story about how he was late for a flight and he was worried he wasn't going to make it. So instead of returning his rental car to the rental car place, he just left it at the departure's drop off. And perhaps to this person, that just seemed like a kind of clever thing to do. Like a loophole that no one had yet discovered. Leave the car and have Hertz figure it out. Except like this is an airport. An abandoned car is a security threat. Police might have to search the car. A bunch of people who have other jobs now have a new thing that they have to deal with. However much the rental car company might charge him for this,
you know, they probably don't even have a policy for it, because nobody thinks to be this much of a jerk. It would not be compensation enough for how much he had inconvenienced a ton of people that day. This is behavior. So often, I think behavior takes the form of like, well, I guess nobody's ever thought of this before. People never thought, oh, I can just leave my rental car at the departure's drop off. No. Maybe they never thought of it, or maybe they thought about it and dismissed it because they realized that they would be removing way more value from other people's world than they would be granting to their own. And that would be
an asshole-y thing to do, which is why I think littering bothers us. Not because it causes a lot of harm, but because it cannot possibly be granting that much value to the person doing the littering. Now, of course, the deepest examples of behavior are various scams. I get like four to five telephone calls every day that are roughly identical announcements that I have been approved for a loan, and this means I'm deleting voicemails from Tony and Clark and Amber at American Lending House at least once a month so my voicemail box doesn't fill up. And researchers know that the amount of money that the scammers are making is much lower than the amount of like value
they are extracting. There was a study on email scammers that once calculated they might be making around $200 million a year, but end up costing the world something like $20 billion a year. 101 ratio of the value they actually extract, which is not like that's not actually a positive sum because they're stealing it. But the amount of money that they're actually stealing from society is 100 times more than the money that they physically steal from individuals. Sometimes I find myself doing something extremely annoying, like going into the bank to be physically present to make some change to my account, and I know that this is 100% because some figured out how to do a scam, and now everybody has to live in a worse world to prevent them from
doing what they thought was just a loophole that they figured out. There's so many things like this, and I just think of them as like tax. Like it's just cost laid upon society by criminals and We are constantly paying taxes. I feel like the complexity of the US tax code is like 90% taxes. Just like things we had to add because somebody figured out like a clever workaround. And of course, you can also slide it all the way to the top where, for example, a leader at a country might openly engage in corruption that will net him like a few million dollars at the expense of the credibility of the entire country. Literally, hundreds [snorts] of billions or trillions of dollars of value might be traded by a corrupt
politician for mere millions of dollars. The largest part of the value being lost, of course, being a value of a country that can no longer trust its leaders and which trust in general is degraded because trust is the thing. It's the thing that societies are built on. The corrupt despot, literally like ultimate behavior, just sucking value out of a society for usually not that much money. I'm always shocked by how little money they will destroy value for. Now, of course, there is complexity to my universal theory of behavior. For example, people have to realize it's happening. Obviously, scammers are very visible and everybody, including the scammers, know that they're doing a bad thing. But there
are, of course, ways in which it might be a lot less clear or where we just have society set up to accept it. For example, there's a very good case to be made that most people would likely agree that buying meat from animals that were raised in factory farmed confined spaces creates more negative value for the animals than positive value for the people. Some people might not see it that way, but I think most people would see it that way if they saw what it was like to live in that situation. But most people don't see it. Often intentionally, it is hidden from them or intentionally they hide that truth from themselves. And then of course, you're asking like where does the behavior lie? Is it in the hiding the
truth from yourself? Is it in other people hiding the truth from you? Is it in the government not doing what everybody would like us to do, which is to ban confined animal feeding operations? Where along the chain does the behavior lie in a world that is very complicated and interconnected and lots of things are leaning on each other. And of course, there's also a bunch of stuff where it's just not super easy to do the calculation. Like maybe it's behavior, maybe it's not. If it's not clear, we're not going to think of it that way. But an important part of the unified theory of behavior is if behavior gets normalized, it does stop being behavior, but it does not stop making the world worse. But check this out,
John. If everyone always and only engaged in behavior, the world would fall apart instantly. If everyone took from the world more than they added, nothing would work anymore. So there must be some counterforce to behavior. And it must actually be very big because I see behavior all the time. So the countervailing force must be huge. And I have coined a term for this behavior. I call it being normal. Because when people engage in everyday normal human behavior, which we all do, they create more value than they destroy. And this is hard to notice because it's actually just the way people usually act. And it would be very easy to make a video about behavior and ignore the normal stuff. But I think it would also be
pretty misleading. But a final important note here, because I remember after privately fuming about people saving tables at the hobnob and thinking, well, what am I going to do? These are just going to be I saw a guy, it was an older guy, somebody laid their jacket down on a table. This older guy said to the guy who laid his jacket down on the table, he said, hey, sorry, you can't save a table until after you ordered your food. And that was just like a little rule, you know? And there are so many rules to prevent behavior and they are mostly not written down. They're mostly not laws. But they aren't just things that we do.
They're also things that we a little bit enforce. Because that guy then picked up his jacket and he waited. We don't always know what is proper behavior and what isn't. We don't build society alone. We build society together. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
