Sixteen Fun Facts About Me

Richard Hanania, whose Kakistocracy released today, recently shared “Sixteen Fun Facts About Me,” so I thought I’d do the same. Maybe I’ll start a trend.

1. I have many hundreds of vivid, detailed memories about my childhood, starting from around the age of 3. The earliest memory: Pleading with my mom to let me skip preschool. “Why?” she asked. “Because of the mean kids!” I whimpered. She still made me go.

2. When I got satellite television around 1997, I routinely pressed the “Info” button to learn the release year of every movie I watched. During the next ten years, I memorized the release years of about a thousand movies. During my childhood, the only reliable way to see a movie was to watch it during its original theatrical release. Since I also have vivid, detailed memories about most of the movies I saw in theaters during my childhood (and adulthood, too), I often use movie release years to organize careful chronologies of my life. For example, I saw WarGames (1983) with my brother at the theater on Parthenia Street the same day that my best friend suffered a horrible family tragedy. So that happened sometime during the summer between grades 6 and 7.

3. I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t extraordinarily arrogant by disposition. Even when I was five years old, I felt like my mom was making glaring mistakes and should take orders from me. And I bluntly told her so! When I started collecting minor accomplishments, my inner sense of self-satisfaction grew stronger and stronger. Now it’s sky high.

4. My main saving grace: I eventually acquired a good sense of humor about my deep-set megalomania. I know how ludicrously inflated my self-image is. But in all candor, self-love is the Wagnerian leitmotiv of my life. I feel totally incapable of feeling any other way. My secondary saving grace, according to my best friend from Princeton: I have absolute megalomania rather than relative megalomania, so I’m also delighted by the company of other ludicrously arrogant people. Primarily if, like me, they have a sense of humor about it.

5. In high school, I clearly had the lowest IQ of my four closest friends. Two were math prodigies of local legend. Another could almost immediately do detailed volume problems in calculus in his head. (“You just have to think about it,” he unhelpfully told me). In contrast, I have never been smart enough to “figure out” complex math on my own. To get A’s on high school math (and a 5 on Calculus BC), I had to spend about two hours on homework every weeknight year after year.

6. If I wasn’t even the smartest kid in my high school, why do I feel so intellectually awesome? The deepest reason is probably pure personality psychology. I am built to feel like a genius even if the facts don’t support that judgment. But in my own mind, my truly superlative intellectual trait is not my intelligence, but my creativity. All self-serving bias aside, I am the most creative person I have ever met. Original ideas constantly pop into my head, far more than I could ever write up. Google and AI routinely confirm that, whatever their merits, most of my “original ideas” in economics, philosophy, political science, history, and psychology are indeed novel to me. And when I decided to write my first graphic novel, I really did manage to recruit my favorite world-famous artist for the job, and the book really was a New York Times bestseller. Is it risible that I have this superlative self-assessment for a trait with no well-accepted standardized test? Absolutely, but I struggle to believe anything else.

   

   Homer: “You don’t understand how the creative mind works like I do. You look at this table and what do you see? Just a table. Now a creative person like me looks at this table and sees all kinds of creative things.”

7. In junior high, I created a vast fictional universe for my Dungeons and Dragons game, where I served as the Dungeon Master for all three years. (Notice the map behind me in most of my podcasts? I made that in junior high). My D&D universe (Endalagon) was admittedly highly derivative of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, but the adventures in my high school game (every Saturday evening, prom night included) were all Caplan originals, never canned modules. In the 21st century, I’ve written about seventy original role-playing game scenarios in almost every genre of fiction to play with my kids and friends: fantasy of course, but also historical, horror, sci-fi, Western, action, absurdist, conspiracy, espionage, crime, and even Japanese baseball manga. I am not confident that I can write dialogue at a professional level, but I think my current skill at plotting stories is well above the median of top novelists and screenwriters.

8. I have wanted to be a professor since junior high, but until the summer after high school graduation (when I went to the Mises University summer seminar at Stanford), I personally knew zero professors. What did I want to be a professor of? The subject shifted dramatically over time. English literature was my first imagined field. I kid you not. I loved the classics, and daydreamed about being a latter-day Mark Twain or Edgar Allan Poe. But even in my youth, I knew that becoming a successful novelist was a long shot, and — knowing nothing about academia — assumed that being an English professor was a safe fallback. I didn’t drop my English professor plan until 12th grade, when I discovered both philosophy and economics via Ayn Rand.

9. I’ve never even tried to learn an instrument, but I’ve enjoyed music since the age of 11, when I started listening to L.A.’s KIIS FM. My 7th-grade music appreciation class alerted me to the existence of classical and opera, but it wasn’t until high school that I embraced them. Around 11th grade, I started obsessively consuming classical and opera. I started my CD collection in 1988, when my parents gave me a CD player for Christmas. Now I own about 4000 CDs, with roughly three-quarters in classical and opera. I listen to music 6-8 hours per day, and actually have trouble focusing without it. Part of the reason I studied German in college was to follow German libretti in the original language. (The other reason is that I falsely believed that I needed a foreign language for a Ph.D., but I caught that mistake before starting German 1). While classical and opera are the cornerstones of my music consumption (I’m coincidentally listening to Wagner’s Siegfried on my retro Sony 200-CD jukebox right now), I keep exploring new genres. For the last few years, I’ve mostly been listening to heavy metal, punk, and emo (assuming My Chemical Romance counts as emo).

10. Ayn Rand all but killed my sense of humor when I was 17-19. While I wasn’t especially comedic in my childhood, her stoic heroic style inspired me. Over the next few years, however, my sense of humor re-emerged, much stronger than before. By the time I was in my late-20s, daily life started seeming hilarious to me, and still does. When I go to the movies, I am often the only person in the theater laughing hysterically at top volume, usually at lines that no one else even chuckles at. While I’m clearly subpar for a professional comedian, I was pleased that when I performed alongside eight professional comedians at the Comedy Cellar, I was not obviously the worst.

11. During college at UC Berkeley, I vacillated between wanting to be a philosophy professor and wanting to be an economics professor. When one field started to disappoint me, I switched to imagining my future in the other. In the end, I had an epiphany that led me to swear myself to econ. The epiphany: While I cared more about the big questions of philosophy than the big questions of economics, I cared more about the small questions of economics than the small questions of philosophy. Since, my epiphany continued, professors are largely limited to small questions, econ was the discipline for me. Ironically, I drastically underestimated the latitude that professors enjoy, so I’ve been able to work on the big questions of both economics and philosophy ad libitum for decades, while drawing an economist’s salary rather than a philosopher’s.

12. I have never been drunk. Unless you count NyQuil, I have barely even tried alcohol. And to this day, I am not sure I have ever smelled marijuana. Apparently I give off a strong narc vibe, because no one even tried to get me to try drugs until 2020 when some of my friends in Austin pushed psychedelic mushrooms on me. (“All smart people do mushrooms, Bryan.”) Why not try these fabled substances? For one thing, because I’m already highly uninhibited, and worry about what I would do if I became any less inhibited.

13. When I was in college, I wasn’t sure I even wanted kids. What changed my mind? Besides growing up: meeting Sheldon Richman and reading Julian Simon. Once I actually became a father, however, my first-hand experience mattered most of all. Being a dad (x4) really is the most meaningful thing I have done with my life, the key life choice where I feel zero ambivalence. Honestly, I think that the average kid just has a much better personality than the average adult.

14. I have one best friend per school I’ve been at. K-9: Matt Mayers. High school: Kevin Hatanaka. UC Berkeley: Fabio Rojas. Princeton: Jim Schneider. GMU: Robin Hanson. I had a girlfriend in kindergarten. I went on roughly three arguable dates with three different girls in high school and college. But the sole woman that I ever unambiguously dated is my wife, Corina Caplan (nee Mateescu). We had our first date in December of 1990, and got married in June of 1994.

15. I’ve known that being a U.S. professor is a sweet gig since the summer after high school. But only after becoming a professor did I realize how absurdly plush these sinecures are. Yes, a tenured professorship is literally a dream job for life. Economists in particular earn a lower-upper (not “upper-middle”!) class income in exchange for about 30 weeks of actual work per year. And during those weeks, you only have to spend about 5 hours in the classroom! To fully capitalize on this opportunity, to be clear, extreme non-conformism is a must. Otherwise, you’ll keep researching topics that bore you because “that’s what serious scholars are supposed to do,” assigning and grading essays because “that’s what dedicated teachers are supposed to do,” and toiling on silly committees because “that’s what decent colleagues are supposed to do.”

16. Selfishly speaking, the most important trait any human can have is “being good at lunch.” People who are good at lunch are bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. If they don’t present their own ideas, they at least eagerly engage the ideas of others. High intelligence is necessary but far from sufficient. In fact, my go-to negative verdict on other scholars is “smart but useless.” Smart but useless thinkers excel on standardized tests and academic publishing, but are low in creativity, agency, and non-conformity, so they waste their lives applying their mighty intellects to questions that barely matter.

P.S. If anything I’ve said here makes you like me less, I’m sorry to let you down. But this is the real me.

P.P.S. I also love showtunes, including…