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A Unified Theory of A**hole Behavior

2026-11-06 · letter vlog · Hank · 10:03 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Philosophy & meaning (also: Everyday life) · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion, fundraising ask

Hank proposes a unified theory of asshole behavior: getting something for yourself in a way that costs the world more than you gain, as in saving a restaurant table before ordering, abandoning a rental car, scams and corrupt leaders; such costs are an 'asshole tax', while the far larger counterforce is ordinary behavior and the unwritten rules people enforce together.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Awesome Socks Club and Awesome Undies Club window

  • ★★ Hank tells viewers the Awesome Socks Club window is open for only eight more days, until 14 November 2026, for the Awesome Socks Club or the Awesome Undies Club. — 00:00:00 · Awesome Socks Club
  • ★ Hank says there are lowered prices on many things, including a subscription for exactly 12 months that then auto-cancels, a good Christmas gift for someone else or for oneself. — 00:00:00 · Awesome Socks Club
  • ★★ Hank says that to keep things efficient and costs down, the sock and underwear clubs open only during very limited windows once or twice a year. — 00:00:00 · Awesome Socks Club

00:00:29 — A swearing warning; saving tables at a crowded breakfast place

  • ★★ Hank calls the clubs the best way to buy socks or underwear: all the profit goes to expand health-care access for the people who need it most, and the products are high quality. — 00:00:29 · Awesome Socks Club
  • ★ Hank warns that the video will use the swear word in its title a lot, an exception on Vlogbrothers, where they don't tend to curse. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank misses a busy breakfast place in his neighborhood where people ordered at a counter and there were never enough tables, so waiting in line was nerve-wracking. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Hank says claiming a table in a crowded restaurant before you are going to sit at it is asshole behavior, and that he can say exactly why. — 00:01:18 · Unified theory of asshole behavior

00:01:47 — Aaron James's definition and Hank's unified theory; the Hobnob Cafe table

  • ★★ Hank says Aaron James, a philosophy professor at UC Irvine, wrote a book on assholes: people who repeatedly grant themselves special advantages out of entitlement, usually immune to others' complaints; Hank read only a synopsis. — 00:01:47
  • ★★ Hank likes Aaron James's definition but wants a more economic argument about the entitlement people grant themselves, judging the behavior rather than the person. — 00:01:47 · Unified theory of asshole behavior

  • ★★★ Hank's unified theory of asshole behavior: it is getting something for yourself in a way that costs the world more than you gain. — 00:02:16 · Unified theory of asshole behavior

    “Asshole behavior is getting something for yourself in a way that costs the world more than you gain.”

  • ★★ In a hypothetical at the Hobnob Cafe, Hank says taking a freed table when both he and John have already ordered is perhaps discourteous but zero-sum: one loses, one gains. — 00:02:46

  • ★★★ Hank says saving a table while still in line keeps it from serving anyone else, so the restaurant's capacity shrinks: a subtraction of value, more removed from the world than gained. — 00:02:46 · Unified theory of asshole behavior

00:03:15 — The rental car left at departures; loopholes and littering

  • ★★ Hank recalls a successful stand-up comedian, no longer well thought of, telling how, late for a flight, he left his rental car at the airport departures drop-off instead of returning it. — 00:03:15
  • ★★★ Hank says a car abandoned at an airport is a security threat that police may have to search, burdening many people, and no rental company charge would make up for it: asshole behavior. — 00:03:51
  • ★★ Hank says asshole behavior often looks like a loophole nobody has thought of, when people may have thought of it and dismissed it as removing more value from others than it gives them. — 00:04:20
  • ★★ Hank thinks littering bothers people not because it causes a lot of harm, but because it cannot give the person littering much value. — 00:04:20

00:04:50 — Scam calls, spammers and the asshole tax

  • ★ Hank says he gets four to five near-identical calls a day announcing he has been approved for a loan, and deletes the voicemails at least monthly so his voicemail box doesn't fill up. — 00:04:50
  • ★★ Hank cites a study estimating that email spammers make around $200 million a year but cost the world something like $20 billion a year. (hedged) — 00:04:50
  • ★★ Hank says the value scammers take from society is a hundred times the money they actually steal from individuals. — 00:05:19
  • ★★ Hank says he sometimes has to go into the bank in person to change his account, which he knows is because someone figured out a scam, so everyone lives in a worse world. — 00:05:19

  • ★★★ Hank calls the costs laid upon society by criminals and assholes an 'asshole tax', which we are constantly paying. — 00:05:56 · asshole tax

    “I just think of them as like asshole tax.”

  • ★★ Hank jokes that the complexity of the US tax code is mostly asshole taxes: rules added because somebody found a clever workaround. (playful) — 00:05:56 · asshole tax

  • ★★★ Hank says a country's leader may openly engage in corruption that nets him a few million dollars at the expense of the whole country's credibility, trading hundreds of billions or trillions in value. (hypothetical) — 00:05:56

00:06:26 — The corrupt despot and trust; people have to realize it is happening

  • ★★★ Hank says most of the value lost to a corrupt leader is a country that can no longer trust its leaders, with trust degraded in general: trust is what societies are built on. — 00:06:26
  • ★★ Hank calls the corrupt despot the ultimate asshole behavior, sucking value out of a society, and is always shocked by how little money such despots destroy value for. — 00:06:26
  • ★★ Hank says his theory has complexity: people have to realize it is happening; scammers know they do wrong, but elsewhere it is less clear or society is set up to accept it. — 00:06:55 · Unified theory of asshole behavior

00:07:24 — Factory farming and where along the chain the asshole behavior lies

  • ★★★ Hank thinks most people, if they saw it, would agree that buying meat from factory-farmed animals in confined spaces creates more negative value for the animals than positive value for people; most people don't see it. — 00:07:24
  • ★★ Hank says the truth about factory farming is often intentionally hidden from people, or they intentionally hide it from themselves. — 00:07:24
  • ★★ Hank asks whether the asshole behavior lies in the government not doing what he says everybody would like, banning confined animal feeding operations, in a complicated, interconnected world. — 00:07:53
  • ★★ Hank says that for much behavior the calculation is not easy, and if it is not clear whether it is asshole behavior, people will not think of it that way. — 00:07:53 · Unified theory of asshole behavior

00:08:23 — Normalized asshole behavior and the counterforce of being normal

  • ★★★ Hank says that when asshole behavior gets normalized it stops being asshole behavior, but it does not stop making the world worse. — 00:08:23
  • ★★★ Hank says that if everyone took more from the world than they added, the world would fall apart instantly; since he sees asshole behavior all the time, the counterforce must be huge. — 00:08:23
  • ★★★ Hank names the counterforce 'being normal': in everyday normal behavior people create more value than they destroy, which is hard to notice because it is just how people usually act. — 00:08:56
  • ★★ Hank says a video about asshole behavior that ignored normal behavior would be easy to make but pretty misleading. — 00:08:56

00:09:18 — The older man at the Hobnob and the unwritten rules we enforce

  • ★★ After privately fuming about people saving tables at the Hobnob, Hank saw an older man tell someone who laid his jacket on a table that you can't save a table until after ordering. — 00:09:18
  • ★★★ Hank says there are many rules to prevent asshole behavior, mostly unwritten and not laws, that people also a little bit enforce: the man with the jacket picked it up and waited. — 00:09:18
  • ★★★ Hank closes that we don't always know what proper behavior is, and that we build society together, not alone. — 00:09:47

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: asshole tax · Unified theory of asshole behavior

Also: People: Aaron James

Projects: Awesome Socks Club · Awesome Undies Club

Works: Aaron James's book on assholes

Organizations: Hertz · University of California, Irvine

Concepts: concentrated animal feeding operation · confidence trick · externality · intensive animal farming · litter · political corruption · social norm · spamming · trust · zero-sum game

Places: Hobnob Cafe

Policies: Internal Revenue Code

Only in the description or credits: Good Store

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