Joseph Hatch and The Hidden Mindset Behind Rich People

The Good Guys Don’t Always Win

In 1889, on a windy little Island halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, a supervillain began boiling penguins. The man's name was Joseph Hatch. He was a known poacher, a ruthless capitalist, and a drug merchant. Up until now, Hatch made his money dealing powdered bone, seal oil, blubber, and other animal parts. But now, with the invention of a new type of boiler, he found he could extract oil from smaller animals, friendly animals, animals who hadn't developed a fear of humans yet.

The machine he used was called Steam Digesters (made originally for elephant seals). Imagine giant pressure cookers, heavy and rusted, where hundreds of penguins could be rendered down into oil to the tune of 1000 Royal Penguins per day, per digester. Theoretically, one digester could fit about a 100 cramped people or 255 mashed people. Overall, Hatch killed 3 million Penguins over 30 years. The island Hatch chose to decimate was Macquarie Island, because he discovered that whales and seals took time and effort to hunt. They had to be killed, carved up, and carted back to the boilers. Penguins, on the other hand, were easier to handle and were friendlier. They could be guided towards the boilers alive, clubbed, and loaded.

When Hatch sold his penguin oil, he found it to be highly lucrative, but also highly unpopular. In fact, Hatch’s penguin masker started a campaign to defend the penguins, but not just any campaign. It was the first-ever International PR campaign to stop the murder of endangered species. That's how villainous Joseph Hatch was, even in his own time. And yet he kept on boiling. He found himself, again and again, defending his action to the public, to parliament, and the courts. I think it's safe to say Joseph Hatch knew he was the villain of this story.

Does it pay to be the bad guy? That's the question. We're asking today with politics and Corporate America in mind. It sure seems like being ruthless, villainous, or just plain nasty really wins big in the long term. Most high earning CEOs readily admit to having tempers or being outright mean when they need to be: like Jeff Bezos. To get to the bottom of what it takes to win, we're looking at three of our closest held myths.

Myth 1: Happy people live longer, more fulfilling lives.

Before we started, did you ever believe in your life that villainous people prospered more? Disney and stories try to teach us that they will get their comeuppance, that they can't possibly prosper in the long run. But that is not real life. It seems so unfair, which is why we dug out research to understand if miserable people live longer and better lives? We had an episode called polar opposite collaborators. And in that, we briefly talked about if it pays to be the bad guy in the boardroom if you can yield results?

First off, we're going to talk about an article from the BBC Future, "Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered." So that title alone probably tells you where we're headed with this episode. This BBC article talked about how angry people have an easier time discriminating between weak and strong arguments. When you see articles about Jeff Bezos getting angry and yelling at his team, or you see articles about Mark Zuckerberg getting irate, it turns out when you get angry, it's easier to discriminate as a decision-maker over people who have neutral moods.

There was also a meta-study on anger looking at incidences of cancer, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and diabetes, and they found that people are at higher risk when they repress their anger. Apparently, blowing off steam is healthier for you than letting it boil. There's a lot of self-awareness that goes into it. You need to know what's a healthy place for you to express anger and a healthy way for you to do it. Don't go punching holes in walls, and don't scream at your spouse. But repression is not good, which is the takeaway.

Now we get to another side of being evil, which is most evil people are portrayed as being cynical. If you are cynical or start to have some of that creep in, it can serve you as long as you don't let it take over. According to an article, cynics generally have more stable marriages and earn more money, and they live longer if they are more pessimistic about their future and their future satisfactions.

I would think the positive person would have better marriages. What I could find is cynics are more realistic about their chances, both with marriage and with money. They believe the worst will happen, so they plan for it. They measure more, and they prepare. So, when the worst happens in a marriage or have money issues, they've already planned for it and know how to remediate fast. But there is a line between being self-aware cynical, and being miserable and mean.

Myth 2: Good people make just as much money as jerks, and not all rich people are a-holes.

This is a fantastic article by Christopher Ryan, "Why are rich people so mean?" It's an excellent read. We are going to start with this because I thought that was a great way to analyze the meanness or evilness of wealthy people. Christopher talks about a guy working in California, Hal Steger, who had a net worth of about 3.5 million, and he was ready to retire with his wife and live off 75k a year. He figured he could retire at age 51, and it would be a glorious life. But instead, he didn't retire. He stayed on, and he continued to work 12 hours a day and 10 hours on the weekends. And when asked why he chose not to retire, he said a few million doesn't go as far as it used to. That was his reason.

Chris Ryan goes around interviewing guys who are worth enough money to where they should never have to work again. They're looking to the people above them and saying I'm not worth that much, comparing themselves. Like Hollywood, if you park your Porsche next to even more rare cars, you don't have as much by comparison. Millionaire's look at their lifestyle the same. You see that in athletics and academics as well; if you only have a Bachelors, you visually wish you had your Masters or Ph.D. because you feel inferior to those people.

So, does being a villain earn you money, or does the money turn you into a villain? It's the chicken or the egg. Chris Ryan has a story where he talks about how he went to India on this business trip, and he is being begged for money in the streets. Chris talks about how he had to learn how to insulate himself because when you see that, any American would realize that their car could buy a school here or fund the college. What he says is he had to distance himself. He realized that he would have to walk away. He could give them money and food. But at some point, you do have to walk away because you can't help everybody. It doesn't so much insulate you as it isolates you by force.

A New York State Psychiatric Institute study (listed in the same article above) talked about how rich people are more likely to walk out of stores with merchandise without paying. There's a myth that poor people steal more often, or that they're doing it because they're hungry or because they feel like there's an entitlement. Wealthy people are actually more likely to walk out with stuff that they haven't purchased because they feel entitled because they've been regulars there. They feel like it's almost like a coupon discount like I have spent $900 here this week.

There's another study looking at how much people contribute to taxes. The other myth we want to bust is wealthy people contribute more, that they give more and save a lot. However, they found this study by Independent Sector, incomes below 25K a year gave more percentage of their income than the rich who make 150k or more. According to University of Toronto researcher Stephanie Nixon and her colleagues, they think the distance created by wealth is what breaks the flow of human kindness. So, when we talk about sitting at a cafe in India like Chris was, and walking away from kids begging when you do have money is a prime example.

Just to recap real quickly, rich people are more likely to walk out with products they haven't paid, they donate slightly less percent wise to their taxes, and they’re more blind to facial cues of people in poverty.

Our last study comes from UC Berkeley. And this was a famous experiment called The Monopoly Experiment.  Say we sat down and we started playing Monopoly and I hand you extra money, and let you take multiple turns to start with.

How do you think you would feel about your advantage when we start the game? Would you believe it was unfair? Do you feel like you will win? There were a lot of people involved in the study. They would give one person playing Monopoly all the advantages, and then they would let them play through the game. Then they would bring out pretzels in the middle of the table, letting people take them as much as they want. And the person who was winning, who had all these advantages to start out, took more pretzels than anyone else. At the end of the game, they would test them and ask them how they felt about your performance? They didn't talk about how they had started with an advantage or even knowledge that; they would mostly talk about their skill and their ability.

Myth 3: Can a rich supervillain like Joseph Hatch be reformed? In other words, could we pull a scrooge on Jeff Benzo, or reform any rich a-hole?

Generally, people like Joseph Hatch are pretty evil, and the answer that I found was that yes, you can reform people. All you have to do is expose them to a social atmosphere. That's challenging, but I'll start to break that down. We're going to go through some more experiments and science here. They did a test once to see who was most cautious on the road or more aware of other people on the sidewalk. Can you guess what type of car people drove that were the worst drivers? BMW drivers. So, if you know someone who drives a BMW, do not step in front of them while they're driving.

This is, again, another study from UC Berkeley by the same team. They invented a game where participants who showed the most lavish generosity with their money benefited from their peers' respect and were given social influence. So, to phrase that differently, the game rewarded them socially instead of with money. The more generous they were during the game, the more control they had and the more social rewards they got. The findings suggest that anyone who acts only in his or her narrow self-interest will be shunned, disrespected, and even hated, but those who behave generously with others are held in high esteem. This just shows that there's more social status in generosity than there is with money, and it worked. It made them want social status more than they wanted the money status.

There was another study that reinforces this that the kind of backed it up for me. They showed people a forty-six-second video about childhood poverty, and they had them document their wealth. Rich subjects were willing to help a stranger who appeared in distress in the lab. They were willing to help way more often after watching this video. That's a transformation. All you need to do is remind them that we value social leaders. We value and respect generous people.

Final Thoughts

It might surprise you, but cynicism and anger, the Hallmarks of villainy, can totally pay off.  Anger can aid you in your decision making, allowing you to be more discriminatory against bad information. And not repressing anger can have health benefits, such as fighting against cancer and hypertension, support you in experiencing more stable relationships, help you make more money, and genuinely live longer.

But you don't necessarily need to become a miserable old cuss to achieve these things. The binding theme of cynics and cranks is this: allow your emotions to be recognized and expressed in healthy ways. Be realistic with yourself and with your expectations. And yes, if you've ever suspected that rich people are assholes, it's true. Study after study has shown that wealthy earners isolate themselves and are used to saying “no” as a requisite to having wealth at all. Rich people can become blind to social cues, become less generous with their donations, and tend to blame their good fortune or inheritance on their own skills and smarts instead of luck.

But we have to keep something in mind. This isolation isn't a rich condition; It's a human condition. It's an internal defense, a way to make sense of our absurdly good fortune in a world where extreme poverty exists, and we know this because it is formed by the wealthy against the poor, developing quickest in areas of extreme inequality. And like Scrooge, these features are reversible.

Nobody wants to think of themselves as a villain, not even our penguin killer Joseph Hatch, who lived to the ripe old age of 91, still defending his practice of boiling penguins—still trying to keep his oil Enterprise afloat while surrounded by family and pictures of his sailboats.

Written by Todd Lemense presented by Joe Anthony