Conversation with Anger Professor Dr. Ryan Martin — The Science of Anger

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Hey there, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a podcast about tech and media and what happens when they collide. And this week,

we're talking about the symbiosis, the codependency between big time sports and big TV. And what's

going to happen to that equation as the TV industry gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

On to explain it all is the veteran sports business journalist, John O'Ran.

That's this week on Chann channels from the Box Media Podcast Network.

Episode 333.

I-333 is a major north-south highway in the U.S.

In 1933, the first Krispy Kreme opened

in Nashville, Tennessee.

What did the coffee cake say to the donut

while they were having sex?

Oh my God, you're going to make me crumb. I like that.
Dad joke and pornographic. Little dad porn.
Go, go, go! Welcome to the 330rd episode of the Prof G Pod. What's's happening the dog is back home in london so i'm dealing with okay first off i'm running on empty i got back here i'm jet lagged i'm a night person to begin with so i typically stay up till four and unfortunately i am with or fortunately i'm with my 14 year old who has to be up at seven for this whole just awful shitty construct called school.
And I get up with him and I make him a bagel, which he doesn't eat. He doesn't like my cooking.
And then we hang out for a little bit and then he's off. And I've been up too long to get back to sleep.
And then it is chaos in my house with the dogs, the dog walkers. I moved into basically a home that we're redoing and it's not done.
So I'm literally running on empty right now. I can't see anything.
I'm so tired. Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Dr.
Ryan Martin, an anger expert, psychology professor, and author of How to Deal with Angry People and Why We Get Mad, How to Use Your Anger for Positive Change. We discussed with Ryan why we get mad, how to deal with anger in a better way, and how to model healthy emotional habits for the next generation.
Okay, moving on. And just a reminder that we recorded this on Tuesday.
TikTok pulled a dramatic disappearing act this weekend and just as quickly came back. Let's break down what happened.
TikTok shutdown lasted about 14 hours. During that time, users couldn't access the app or download it from Apple or Google Play stores.
The app showed a message that it was offline due to a law banning TikTok unless it sold to a non-Chinese owner. TikTok posted a pop-up message asking users to stay tuned.
Then, early Sunday, Trump announced he would issue an executive order delaying the enforcement of the ban once he takes office. Within hours, TikTok was back online.
TikTok welcomed its 170 million American users back with a message that read, as a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S. Okay, great.
So what's going on here? So first off, I think this is kind of a part of a much bigger picture. And what I loosely refer to is we are no longer a serious people.
So the ban, they had six months to try and figure out what to do or come to some sort of accommodation. And you know what they said to us? Hold my beer.
We don't believe you. So what did we do? The most powerful nation in the world? We blinked.
Instead, just kidding, just kidding. We're going to give you another 60, 75, 90 days.
Folks, what do you think is going to happen now, now that we have even less credibility? Oh, and by the way, by the way, what is evidence? What is the best piece of data I can give you for why TikTok should be banned? Within 24 hours, they were able to rally, inspire, light up, on demand, tens of millions of people within the U.S. to apply political pressure that resulted in the president of the United States going back on a law, a law upheld by the Supreme Court.
Why? Because whether it's TikTok, a Singapore-based company, or the CCP, which legally mandates any company in China, give its data over or comply with Chinese interests, essentially they were able to spin up propaganda and inspire action to put political pressure on the president, the administration, and lawmakers, which is exactly why it should be banned. What happens when they invade Taiwan? What happens when they think of issues that divide us even further and they can just spin up and elevate content such that we either divide each other or do things that serve their interests and not ours? For God's sakes, would we let the Kremlin control CBS, NBC, and ABC in the 60s? What's Trump's plan? He floated the idea of a 50-50 joint venture between ByteDance and American owner, though it's unclear if that would satisfy lawmakers.
So there's a term for this. I know TikTok's an amazing company.
He said it's worth a trillion dollars. The U.S.
is going to be a joint partner with TikTok. We're going to own 50 percent of it, said President Trump.
There's a word for that. There's a word for that public-private partnership in business.
Socialism. That's literally the definition of socialism when the means of production is owned by and controlled by the government.
And we have decided through centuries of capitalism, and it has been proven over and over, that the government is shitty at owning businesses. They're okay at running the Navy and the National Park Service and running operations where there's no profit incentive.
But when it comes to a traditional media company with a profit incentive, when the government gets involved, it's just not a good idea. It wasn't a good idea when the UK decided to invest in this hot new automobile company.
Was it Tesla? No, it was a company called DeLorean. Was it a good idea when Obama invested a ton of money in Solandra or gave low interest loans to Tesla?

Probably not.

Generally speaking, the government is not good at running for profit enterprises. And we've come to the conclusion that in America, we let the full body contact violence of competition decide who the winner is and hopefully implement a progressive tax structure, which we have not done as corporations are paying the lowest taxes since 1939, such that we can pay for our Navy and our seniors and food stamps.
But instead, we're going to have ownership. We're going to do a deal of 50% with TikTok.
That just makes absolutely no sense. We are not a serious people here.
Between the kleptocracy of the Trump meme coin, where now basically anybody can transfer money to the president without anybody knowing, without any SEC filings. Hey, here's an idea.
This is Vlad, dear President Trump. Congratulations on your victory.
What if I bought 600 billion rubles worth of the Trump coin, which would make you one of the wealthiest men in the world? And by the way, in unrelated news, could you please seize arms shipments to Ukraine? That is literally where we are. We've decided that on certain issues, the government, we've embraced socialism, but at the same time, we're just with this weird fucking mix, this soup, if you will, this melange, this palate cleanser, although it's not a palate cleanser, it's more like indigestion.
It's more like swallowing a big jagged pull. It's more like an awful peanut, rancid peanut butter and the worst fucking chocolate you've ever had combination of a kleptocracy and socialism.
We are not a serious people. We'll be right back for our conversation with Dr.
Ryan Martin. Last week, we at Today Explained brought you an episode titled The Joe Rogan of the Left.
The Joe Rogan of the Left was in quotations. It was mostly about a guy named Hassan Piker, who some say is the Joe Rogan of the left.
But enough about Joe. We made an episode about Hassan because the Democrats are really courting this dude.
So Hassan Piker is really the only major prominent leftist on Twitch, at least the only one who talks about politics all day. What's going on, everybody? I hope everyone's having a fantastic evening, afternoon, pre-new, no matter where you go.
They want his co-sign. They want his endorsement because he's young and he reaches millions of young people streaming on YouTube, TikTok, and especially Twitch.
But last week he was streaming us. Yeah, I was listening on stream and you guys were like, hey, you should come on the show if you're listening.
I was like, oops, caught. You're a listener.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, I am.
Yeah. Thank you for listening.
Head over to the Today Explained feed to hear Hassan Piker explain himself. So we want to introduce you to another show from our network and your next favorite money podcast, for ours, of course.

Net Worth and Chill hosts Vivian Tu as a former Wall Street trader turned finance expert and entrepreneur.

She shares common financial struggles and gives actionable tips and advice on how to make the most of your money.

Past guests include Nicole Yoder, a leading fertility doctor who breaks down the complex world of reproductive medicine and the financial costs of those treatments.

And divorce attorney Jackie Combs, who talks about love and divorce and why

everyone should have a prenup. Episodes of Net Worth and Chill are released every Wednesday.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch full episodes on YouTube. By the way,

I absolutely love Vivian too. I think she does a great job.
Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Dr.
Ryan Martin, an anger expert. See above my views on TikTok.
Jesus Christ, little angry? How about a little dog with your anger? Psychology professor and author of How to Deal with Angry People and Why We Get Mad, How to Use Your Anger for Positive Change. Professor Martin, where does this podcast find you? I am in Green Bay, Wisconsin in my office.
Let's bust right into it. In your book, Why We Get Mad, How to Use Your Anger for Positive Change, you broke down all things anger, including how to both cope with and use anger to your advantage.
So let's start there. What is anger and how does it affect us and the people around us? Yeah, so anger is an emotion.
It's everything from the mild frustration we feel when we can't find our car keys in the morning to the intense rage we might feel when we are treated just truly, truly terribly or poorly. And as an emotion, though, it of course affects our behavior.
It encourages us to do, you know, sometimes positive things, but also sometimes negative things. So the way it affects

the people around us is that, you know, we can end up hurting people when we're angry. We can end up

criticizing people when we're angry. We can end up engaging in dangerous behaviors that either

may accidentally harm us or someone else or just are unhealthy, right? So people use, you know, alcohol and other drugs when they're angry and so on. So it affects people in all those ways.
So I often say that I struggle with anger and depression and I'm curious, well, I'll describe how I register anger. Maybe I'm mislabeling it, but something triggers me, something dumb.
Sometimes it's something on social media or, I don't know, something upsets me. And I get so pissed off.
And oftentimes, I'd say most of the time it's anger at myself. and then it's like my blood turns to acid and I know this burning sensation

and then it stops and I'm exhausted

and then I go into this depression. Like acid has run through my veins, tired me out, and now I'm just down.
It goes from anger to depression. You know, I think that what you're describing is a relatively common phenomenon that, you know, our emotions don't happen in a vacuum.
We have a tendency to talk about them individually. And I think because that's the simplest way to think about them.
But the truth is that we are angry at the same time. We're sad or depressed or scared or guilty or a host of other things.
And so what ends up happening is moments like what you're describing. We come across something, we don't like it, either because we find it to be unfair or we find it to be poor treatment or because it gets in the way of our goals and being able to achieve those goals.
And so we react negatively to that. Now, of course, if you just take one of those types of provocations, I just meant, you know, not being able to achieve our goals or having our goals blocked, of course, that's going to lead to feelings other than just anger, right? And it makes sense that another emotion that can stem from that is sadness or depression or fear or some other feeling and what was interesting that you said there too is that and i don't know if this is what you meant so if you meant something different definitely correct me but you know this this this idea of acid running through your veins for me and for a lot of people when they're angry it becomes this lens that they're looking world through, right? And so all of a sudden, a lot of other stuff that happens in their life is interpreted in a very negative way, right? It's that sort of phenomenon, I've had a bad morning, and because I've had a bad morning, all of these little other things that are happening are sort of filtered through that experience.
and this sort of negativity begets more negativity and more negativity and it just

kind of keeps going that experience. And this sort of negativity begets more negativity and more negativity, and it just kind of keeps going that way.
And so, yeah, it makes sense that there's this sadness or depression that follows. My father used to say that anger is fine as long as it's planned.
And it reminds me of that photo of Khrushchev at the UN banging his shoe on the table. And the photo is the aperture on it, or the perspective is broad enough that you see he's still wearing two shoes.
So he brought a shoe with a plan to bang it on the table. What are your thoughts? And at least in your book, you discuss the concept of good and bad anger.
Say more. Yeah, I mean, anger can absolutely be used for good.
I mean, ultimately, if we think about emotions from an evolutionary perspective, which is how I tend to think about them,

then they exist in us because they solved some sort of adaptive problem.

And the same way sadness alerts us to loss and fear alerts us to danger, anger alerts us to injustice.

And it provides us energy that we can use to confront that injustice. And I think the question of whether or not your anger is good or is bad in some ways has to do with the consequences of how you use it.
And so if I get angry over, let's say, politics, and because that anger drives me to drink or be depressed or do a host of negative things, things that are bad for me, well, then those consequences, that anger isn't healthy in my life. if that anger drives me to work towards particular, you know, social change works

towards particular positive outcomes, then, you know, that anger, we can think of that as being healthy in my life. You recently wrote a HuffPost piece where you discuss how the state of politics evokes feelings of anger, especially in men.
Can you break down what you meant by that? Yeah. So, and I should actually credit you with this in some ways that ultimately I, maybe the day after the election or two days after the election, I was scrolling through TikTok and I saw a post from you where you were talking really about how this election might have been influenced by male anger more than I guess I was expecting it to be.
And it really gave me pause. It helped me realize some things that I hadn't necessarily been thinking about.
And then coupled with that, I was at a basketball game, my son's basketball game in a relatively small town in Eastern Wisconsin. And a stranger came up to me, said they'd seen me on Theo Vaughn's podcast.
and he wanted to talk to me about his anger. And, you know, this was a person who I suspect is very different for me politically, if I'm just guessing based on demographics.
and the two of us had a really thoughtful conversation. It got me thinking about all of the ways

in which I need to be talking to

and engaging with young men in particular who might be really angry about the state of affairs to help them work through that anger in a healthy way. I dug a little deeper into the research after that, and what I saw is that, okay, men are reporting getting angry almost twice as much as women in their day-to-day lives.
They're experiencing more negative consequences as a result of that anger. And when you look at why they're getting angry, it's a host of reasons.
But one of the biggies is feeling like they didn't get what they wanted, right? That they're not getting something that they are desiring. They're having their goals blocked in a significant way.
If you've decided you have too much anger in your life, and I really go down a rabbit hole. I role-play in my mind confrontations with people or topics, and it's unfair to them.
I imagine them, you know, I imagine myself in an argument with somebody, and that's unfair to them. It's like when you're, I don't know if you've ever woken up and your partner is angry at you because of the way you behaved in their dream.
It's just not cool, right? It's not fair to them. So say you decide for whatever reason, whether it's your own mental health or the way you treat other people, or it's reducing your productivity, that you want to reduce the amount of anger in your life.
Across all of the different practices in behavioral therapy, what do you find are the two or three most effective ways to try and address your anger, other than pharmaceuticals? I start with a real big picture look at this and understanding, okay, so why am I getting angry? What are the patterns here that we're seeing? And you can, anytime you feel something, you kind of map it out. I sometimes diagram this the way you might diagram a sentence or something that it includes really three things.
There's some sort of provocation. There's some sort of thing that happened, unfair treatment, you know, injustice or goal blocking.
Then there's my mood at the time of that provocation. You know, was I stressed? Was I whatever? And then there is my interpretation of that provocation, like how I, what I thought it meant, what I decided it meant in my life.
Did I, did I think I could cope with it? And so on. Once you figure that out and you can see those patterns, then there's actually sort of infinite ways you can intervene.
We can be more aware of what provocations we're inviting into our life. We can manage our stress, make sure we're staying hydrated.
We can exercise, do a host of things there. We can think about how we're interpreting those things and focus on the appraisal.
And then ultimately, we can try and deal with the emotion itself when we experience it. And so through deep breathing, through meditation, those things like that to try and bring it down.
As far as what do I think are the best things, I do think that focusing specifically on that appraisal element.

I think what people need is to figure out how to have a realistic understanding of the consequences of a particular situation. And, you know, we find all the time, I mean, we'll use driving as an example.
you know you get cut cut off, you get angry, and, you know, your interpretation of that is sort of a he shouldn't have done that, or they shouldn't have done that. That was unsafe, that was dangerous.
And all of that may be true. But then the next question is, okay, so what were the consequences? The consequences are that this person cut me off now, what do I do next? And so often people switch into like sort of vigilante mode and it's like, well, I need to get revenge in some way.
But we know that that doesn't actually really help or solve the problem. Oftentimes it makes it worse.
And so I think thinking through, OK, how bad was this? Can I cope with it? What do I do next? Is a good sort of problem-focused way of dealing with it. So I'll just put forward a thesis and you tell me, and I think you'll agree with it, but I find that I'm much less prone to anger the more social I am.
What do I mean by that? When I'm around coworkers or in the office and I'd say, oh, this was a shitty job, they or people around them have a chance to go, well, it was shitty because we didn't get this edit done in time because the power went out. Or I get angry at my partner and they will remind me, well, actually, no, this was your responsibility.
Or the more I'm around people, I hang out with Republicans. And instead of getting angry about, well, how could you elect this guy?

I sort of get some context for why they think the people I'm supporting make no fucking sense either.

It just helps me to be in the company or the presence of other people and to have those guardrails.

It's almost like a solvent for my anger because it helps me have different perspectives and realize a lot of times my anger is more about my gut or that I didn't have lunch or some weird chemical running through my brain than anything I should actually or that justifies my anger. For me, the key is human contact.
That is my Neosporin for anger. Yeah, I think that's fascinating.
And it's really part of what I was trying to communicate in that HuffPost piece, too, is this idea that interacting with other people who see the world differently from us can help provide different ways of interpreting those provocations. And so if I'm only looking at the world through my lens and I'm not listening to other people to try and understand, you know, that broader context, yeah, I'm likely to get angry because I'm doing probably a lot of mind reading about, I mean, it goes back to what you said before about, you know, you sort of role play those interactions with people.
If you could actually have those interactions with someone, you would, they would probably surprise you as far as how they react to things, or maybe they would surprise you about how they react to things. So those conversations that we have, that human contact, it really does shift two things.
One, it shifts that, what we call the pre-anger state, right? Your mood at the time of the anger, of the provocation. It also shifts your interpretation.
It gives you a new way of thinking about whatever this provocation is and helps you see things a little bit differently in a way that might lead to less anger. We'll be right back.
You had said in a conversation with Theo Vaughn that the golden rule of emotion and parenting is kids tend to express emotions the way their caregivers did um so how do you and to me a basic parenting or basic truism is your kids will model your behavior right so what advice do you have for parents in terms of raising resilient kids that know how to leverage good anger and discern between good anger and bad anger? First of all, I do think you have to decide how you want your kids to emote, and then you have to live that. And so if that means you want them to handle their anger in a cool, calm manner, well, then you have to live that, right? So yelling at your kids for being angry isn't going to get you where you want to go.
You're just modeling that behavior and you're probably really scaring them in the process. I used to think about this when my kids were young.
I never wanted them to see me scared of anything that I didn't want them to be scared of, right? So that's how you teach them. So I'm not a great flyer.
I haven't been. And so I find myself anxious when I fly a lot.
And so one of the things that meant is that when I get on a plane with them, I can either let them see me scared or I can just fake it. And even if I'm scared, I'm just going to have to sort of hold that in.
Now that my kids are older, they're 13 and 14, I can kind of communicate, hey, I'm not a great flyer. I don't necessarily love this.
It's totally safe, but I find myself a little anxious about it. You know, we can do the same thing with anger.
There are times when we're really angry where we just need to sort of fake that and hold, I mean, we can still communicate that you're angry, but find ways to, to sort of channel that into healthy behaviors. So they see and understand things, understand kind of healthy ways of, of coping and communicating.
The other thing, and you used a really important word in that question, which was resilience. So how do we teach our kids to be resilient? I think one of the things we have to do is help encourage our kids to engage and actually step into some emotional discomfort.
So one of the things I heard you say, Anthea Vaughn, is that you won't let your kids back in the house unless they talk to someone, right? When there are something along those lines. And I think that's, you know, in some ways, that's about encouraging them to step into some emotional discomfort.
Like, hey, you got to do a difficult thing here. You got to communicate with someone that you might be a little shy around.
I do something similar with my kids. We were at a basketball game over the weekend.
My son, there was another boy about his age there. He was a little uncomfortable interacting with this kid.
And so I tried to give him some clues like, hey, these are things you have in common. Let's practice how you can talk to him about those things, how you can communicate with those things.
Stepping into some of that discomfort so that they learn that the emotion itself probably isn't going to harm them. And they learn to do those kind of emotionally difficult things.
Where is the decision point or framework for communicating anger versus occasionally just not communicating anger? I find a lot of times that I need to take a deep breath and not communicate my anger, recognizing that it's more about what's going on with me than necessarily what that person has done. Do you have any sort of rules of when to express anger and when to kind of keep it to yourself? Yeah, I do.
And I think sort of my internal algorithm there is to think about what what my goal is. What is the outcome I'm looking for? And if my outcome is, or the outcome I'm looking for is, I need this person to maybe do things differently, or I want this person to do things differently.
Well, then I think about, okay, so what's the best way to do that? And that might be for me to communicate to them that I'm feeling frustrated, and that I'm angry with them and that I want to, you know, work through that. And that might be for me to communicate to them that I'm feeling frustrated and that I'm angry with them and that I want to work through that.
There are times though where I think, you know what, this person isn't going to change. That's not going to get me the goal I want.
And so maybe it's better for me to just kind of hold this in, find another way to channel and find another way to deal with it and move forward. And so I tend to focus a little bit on those outcomes and think about, okay, so I want X, what's the fastest way to get there? Really fascinating.
You've done a great job of sort of branding yourself. I think Professor Angela Duckworth is the grit professor.
You're sort of the anger professor.

I love the way you've branded yourself.

Can you give us a little bit of background on how you got to where you are

and when you decided to sort of focus on anger

and where other than teaching, is it books?

Is it also speaking?

Just describe the business of Ryan Martin.

Yeah, so I started studying anger officially in, uh, 1999 when I went to graduate school at the university of Southern Mississippi. Um, I'm originally from Minnesota.
Um, I was, but I was, you know, unofficially studying anger way before that. So I was raised in what we, I think I'm always a little anxious about giving people this, this version of it it because I think it sounds worse than it was.
But I was raised in a relatively angry household. Now, it was a loving household, like we all get along, but we referred to this thing called the Martin temper.
And in particular, the men in my family. So I have two brothers and a sister, and then my dad was a relatively angry guy.
And the interesting thing is very rarely was that anger taken out on each other. I mean, it was usually, you know, my dad, I can count on, you know, just one hand how often he was angry with me.
More often than not, he was angry at coworkers, he was angry at service providers, and so on. And so I became really intrigued by this emotion at an early age.
In college, I worked with at-risk kids, quote unquote, at a shelter in St. Paul.
And I noticed that difficulty controlling anger was a pretty salient common problem for those kids. Now, these were kids who

had a lot to be angry about. The world had not treated them fairly at all, but consistently those challenges were there.
So I went to graduate school with the goal of studying this and was researching that at a certain point, realized I was less interested in clinical work than I was teaching so decided to be a professor and came to uw green bay

where i taught courses on psychopathology and emotion and so on and i think during that time

i became really aware of the fact that i thought the world had a didn't necessarily understand

anger the way it did other negative emotions or perceived negative emotions like fear and sadness. If you just look at the research, there's tons of research on depression, tons of research on anxiety disorders, tons of research on aggression and violence, which, you know, I've already sort of highlighted as a little bit different, but not much on anger.
And so I really decided to go down that rabbit hole to study why people get angry and started writing books and doing talks on it. Any thoughts on what role, if any, anger played in the election? I think it played a considerable role.
And so, you know, I've heard you talk about this a little bit. I mean, I think that it informed people's votes.
I think it encouraged a lot of people to, I mean, I think it plays a role in every election, but I think it informed a lot of people's votes. We also have evidence that, I mean, we have evidence, for instance, that making people angry is a good way to spread your message virally on the internet, that you're more likely to click on political ads if they make you angry.
We also know that angry people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories. Anger is the most viral emotion online, that people are much more likely to share things that make them angry than they are to share things that make them happy, especially if they don't know the person who shared it.
So if I'm scrolling through Facebook and I see something that makes me happy, I might share that, but only if I know the person. You know, I'm like, oh, this person's got good news here.
Let me share it. If I see something that makes me angry, I'm much more likely to share that thing, even if I don't know the person who shared it.
And so all of these things that we're seeing are really driven and motivated by people's rage. Yeah, it feels as if it's sort of, it's been incredibly weaponized by technology that from kind of the end of World War II to to the introduction of google we thought that the ultimate branding strategy was sex sells you know show hot people playing volleyball and if you drink this beer you'll be hot too and then we figured out that actually we found something better than sex and that is rage and that we have these algorithms that find incendiary content, elevate it algorithmically, and we're

all sort of in a state of like near rage all the time. You know, I think I would add to that too, that the part when we go back to why we get mad and we talk about, you know, those provocations and we talk about our mood at the time and our interpretations, the part we haven't really focused on yet is the role that misinformation

plays in all that. And that misinformation both informs the lens through which we see those provocations, but it also informs our interpretation or our appraisal of those things when they happen.
And so when we have leaders who are perfectly willing to lie to us to make us angry and then continue repeating that lie over and over and over again to motivate people to the polls, to motivate people to share that misinformation online. I mean, there is a very, very, very clear incentive for our leaders, and not just our leaders, but others who are marketing to us to make us angry.
And it's hard to combat that. It's hard to fight back at that.
Are people who have a greater tendency to be angry, generally, professionally speaking, more or less successful? Great question. And, you know, this is one of those cases where it depends a little bit on some other factors.
So one of the things we know is very clearly tied to both success and anger is, you know, the type A personality, right? People who are competitive, people who are driven, motivated, focused, they tend to be aggressive and they tend to be angry. And so from that perspective, yes, like we see that.
We also see that, I mean, ultimately when you're that goal driven, one of the consequences of being that goal driven is that it's easy to have your goals blocked. And when you have your goals blocked, you get angry.
So we'll definitely see that. Some of the confounds here is that we tend to see anger, the interpretations of a person's anger are impacted by their race and their gender.
And so some people have more of a license to be angry outwardly and publicly, typically white men who can be angry in that way. And when they are, it was historically, they were perceived as competent and motivated and all sorts of good things.
When women or when non-whites or other marginalized groups express their anger outwardly, they tend to have their qualifications minimized. So they're thought of as too emotional, too sensitive, unprofessional, and so on.
Because I've read that more actually young women are triggered by today's politics, but you're saying that it's actually men who are more easily triggered. I see it as white dudes are basically feel more entitled and have less downside.
And it sounds to me like you're saying the incentive system is to just let your anger flow. And I find, I mean, I'll use an example.
I'm not proud of this. Up until maybe 10 years ago, I found it was really important for me to express my displeasure with service employees if I didn't get upgraded at the Delta counter or I didn't like my room at a hotel.
And then I realized, okay, that's not effective. And I'm channeling my anger to the wrong people.
I'm being heavy handed with the wrong people. but I definitely think it came from a sense of entitlement and I don't know if it was about gender or race

but in the U.S., I think we're so consumer or customer obsessed that we've sort of given license to anyone who's paying someone else for something, the right to be angry at them should there be any misstep or the service isn't right there or your wing stop doesn't get there in the 20 minutes it was promised or the maitre d' or the waiter doesn't show you the respect you think you're entitled to because you're now royalty as you are a customer, so to speak. Is our service mentality leading to people's entitlement around being angry? Yeah.
So one question I recently asked participants in the study was,

you know, which, which of these things is going to make you the most angry? How likely are you

to get angry over these things? And the options were experiencing or witnessing an injustice,

witnessing or experiencing poor treatment, or three was having your goals blocked.

And what we saw is that men were more likely to be triggered by the unfair treatment or having their goals blocked. What they said was like not getting what they wanted, basically.
Women were more likely to be triggered by injustice. this.
And, um, no, the biggest gap though, and this is, goes to your point about entitlement,

the biggest gap there was not getting what I want. Men said that, you know, that there is that was sort of the biggest difference between men and women was that when men don't get what they want, they were much more likely to get angry.
Now, the big question, what's missing from that data is, is it something that people actually deserve or is it just something they want? And I think that there's an interpretation there. Is this a thing that I deserve because I paid all of this money for it? Or is it just a thing I really want? And I think what we're seeing, and anecdotally, I can tell you one of the things we're seeing, or my experience has been that there are a lot of men who interpret something they want as something they deserve.
Dr. Ryan Martin, known as the anger professor, is a psychology professor and the dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
Talk about opportunities to get angry. A faculty leadership role, oh my God, that would drive me batshit crazy.
He's an expert on anger and the author of How to Deal with Angry People and Why We Get

Mad, How to Use Your Anger for Positive Change.

He joins us from Green Bay, Wisconsin, where it's a negative six degrees.

Professor, really enjoyed this conversation.

Thanks for the good work.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

I'll see the scarcity of my relationships with my boys, and that is, I know I'm going to spend a lot of time with my friends the rest of my life. I know I'm going to spend a lot, I'm going to have a lot of opportunity to spend a ton of time with family and my partner and just do amazing things.
Where the light of scarcity is just getting bigger and bigger, and it's becoming so obvious to me that I just don't have that much time left, is I have 14 and 17-year-old boys, which sounds wild even saying it. I remember like it was yesterday, the nurse putting this weird stuff in their eyes when they were born and just them kind of opening their eyes.
I mean, I just remember their births like it was yesterday, mostly because I was incredibly nauseous and don't think men should be allowed in the delivery room. Is that wrong?

Anyways, back to the Algebra of Happiness. The fact that these relationships are coming to an end, and I say that not that I'm not going to have a relationship with my boys when they leave the house, but they're at such a weird time right now.
They are independent and yet kind of withdrawing for me in some ways, but have never needed me more. I find that I'm adding more value or believe I can add more value to my boys' lives now than I was ever able to given I just relate to them, understand what they're going through.
When I talk about my experience as a teenager, I know they kind of perk up, whether it's how I was dealing with, you know, asking girls out or acne or sports or growth spurts or lack of a growth spurt or, you know, just all the things. I don't tell them what to do.
I just talk about my experiences and I can just see them really registering it. And I'm spending a ton of what I call, or what Ryan Holiday calls garbage time with them.
I get up with them in the morning. It's just so rewarding because just to see the way their brains as they go through puberty and they kind of discover the world.
And my oldest is so chill and quietly confident and my youngest is so funny. And so, I mean, you're going to see with your kids, you're just going to be fascinated by how different they are.
But every day, it feels like that one, that 15-year-old is just no longer the 15-year-old. He's a 16-year-old, and in a couple years, they're going to be gone.
And so that big light of scarcity is coming at me. And something I'm happy about, I get very majestic, sad when I think about this, but something I am really happy about is that when I was younger and when they were younger, I did not give into my selfish instincts.
I like to go out with friends. I like to do my own thing.
I like to work out. I like to kind of, you know, me be me, do my own thing.
I'm a selfish person. And I did make a real effort to just have a lot of time with them.
And I'm just so grateful now. And some of it I didn't enjoy, but I'm just so grateful now because that light is just right in my face, that light of scarcity, that light of finite time.
And I'm never going to have these kids again. They're going to be adults, they're going to be in college, and they will not be the same person.
They'll be, you know, hopefully have some of the same values, but you can just see day by day how much they're changing. Anyways, long-winded way of saying the additional time you spend with your kids, I'm not saying be bad at work.
I'm not saying be irresponsible, but occasionally trading off some of that me time, whether it's working out or time with your buddies and just having that garbage time of doing nothing with your kids. Trust me on this.
You're not going to regret it. That light is going to come at you and it's going to get so big so fast.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.

Our intern is Dan Shallon.

Drew Burrows is our technical director.

Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice,

as read by George Hahn.

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