I've been doing the internet antagonizing. I apologize. Not to the people I'm doing it to — they deserve it — but to the universe in general.

Last week I got into two arguments with dudes on the internet. It's like a thing I do. These are always cantankerous dude bros, and they always get what they deserve. The argument is almost always the same.

I have one question. I ask it every time. It brings their very bullish "I know everything about running a workplace" energy down to a full Porky Pig real fast.

I also bring receipts. Because of course I do.

Plus: I got mad about the Turning Point USA halftime show in a business group on the internet, which is exactly where that conversation belongs if you ask me.

And in Small Talk, I answer a question from Nate in Provo, Utah, who doesn't trust compliments but believes every piece of criticism — and I explain why imposter syndrome might actually be the most arrogant thing you can carry around.

Boop.

TIMESTAMPS

00:37 — I got into two arguments with dudes on the internet last week

01:04 — It's almost always the same argument about remote work and micromanagement

02:16 — The call center manager who had a lot to say

02:45 — The one question I have for them

03:57 — I worked at a call center. The best one in the world. It was still awful.

07:21 — If you can only run your business by underpaying people, your business is failing

08:41 — Don't wrestle with pigs. They enjoy it. (I did it anyway.)

09:18 — The Turning Point USA halftime show got me. I tried not to.

12:34 — I'm going to find a different plumber

13:55 — Small Talk: Nate from Provo, Utah on compliments vs. criticism

14:41 — 10,000 compliments: "yeah maybe." Someone says your feet smell: "that HAS to be true."

16:36 — Why imposter syndrome is actually a form of arrogance

Mentioned in this episode:

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I have been doing the internet antagonizing, and I apologize deeply. I asked

one question, and all of a sudden he had so much less to say. I do not want my

money to support people who actively suck. All right, here we go. I'm gonna

pretend I'm pushing record because that feels right. Okay, I'm pressing record.

Boop! Hi everybody, I'm Lauren Howard. Welcome to Different Not Broken, which is

our podcast on exactly that— that there are a lot of people in this world

walking around feeling broken, and the reality is you're just different, and

that's fine.

I got into an argument with a dude on the internet again. Arguments with dudes

on the internet. It's like a thing I do. Actually, I got into two last week.

These are always cantankerous dude bros who get what they deserve.

But it used to happen fairly frequently, and I don't know if I just don't pay

as much attention now or I have scared off the majority of the cantankerous dude

bros, but it has happened twice in, like, the last week, and it feels like

hearkening times of yore, and I kind of like it. But anyway. It's almost the

same argument every time, cuz I talk a lot about remote work and trusting your

employees. Wild idea, I know. Treating your employees like adults because they

will act like adults. Shocking. How could you ever believe that people would,

when paid fairly and treated like adults, would do their jobs? Shocking.

Impossible to believe, right? But I talk about this a lot on the LinkedIn box.

And inevitably on one of these posts, there is some dude bro who wants to point

out that remote work is ineffective. You have to watch your team all the time.

If you don't, they will take advantage of you. If you don't micromanage them,

they will not do their jobs.

[Allison] Arguments with dudes on the internet. Arguments with dudes on the internet.

I had one not that long ago who said that he managed a call center, and if

people were not watched and monitored for call activity all the time, they just

wouldn't take the calls. They just wouldn't take the calls. They would not do

their jobs. They had to be watched and monitored all the time, 100% of the time.

And he had a lot to say. And then I asked one question, and all of a sudden he

had so much less to say. Shocking.

It's a really simple question. I ask it a lot. It really, like, for some reason

brings their very bullish, I know everything about running a workplace attitude

down to maybe I have less to say. And the question is, how much are you paying

them? And then I just wait for the silence. Or the like, full Porky Pig. Because

the answer is never, oh, we pay them really well. It always boils down to, well,

it's an entry level job.

So I pay them entry level wages. So that's what you're saying. Because if you

were paying them well, you would say what you were paying them. What's an

entry-level wage? Minimum wage? 'Cause we know— there's lots of data that shows

that's not a livable wage. $15 an hour? Barely a livable wage. Barely a livable

wage. In most places, still not a livable wage. Double that is barely a livable

wage.

So tell me, how are you paying people who are doing this shitty awful job that

even you don't wanna do? 'Cause if you wanted to do it, you would just do it and

you would do it better than they are, right? And you would reap all the rewards

of their big salaries that you give them. How much are you paying these people

who are doing the worst job in the world? Nobody's working at a call center

because they want to, or because it's a cushy gig. Let's put it that way. They

might like their jobs, they might wanna work there, and I'm certainly not being

negative toward those people who work in those jobs. Everybody needs to work,

everybody needs to eat. If that's the way you pay your bills, good for you. But

nobody's working there with their feet up on their desks enjoying the high life.

I worked in a call center for a long time.

It was awful. And I worked in the call center that was rated the best for both

customer service and employment in the world. So those were the best conditions,

and it was awful. I got yelled at constantly. People would yell at me for things

that had nothing to do with me. I got graded on surveys that people would do

about their experience, except if somebody talked to somebody after me but

before they got the survey, they would grade me on what the other person did—

experiences that you could listen to the call and tell did not even align with

what the call was about, and I would get penalized for it. I would get penalized

for things that other people on my team did. I would get penalized for things

that other departments did.

It was all a game rigged to make sure that you never got recognized for

anything. And guess what?

[Allison] I got paid shit.

I was fresh out of college. I thought I had to go get a job at a big company so

that I could have upward mobility. It was all shit. Oh, and by the way, I think

I was making $13 an hour at the time. Even making $13 an hour on a team full of

people who also made $13 an hour, I still showed up for work every day. I still

did my job at 100%. Our computers were not monitored. I worked in a team of

people, all of whom showed up for work every day.

We had no attendance issues whatsoever. So I don't want to hear about how you

have to micromanage your team. I don't want to hear about it. I've been on that

team. What are you paying them, and why are you expecting them to treat you with

benevolence when they can barely pay their bills on what you're paying them?

While you're also treating them like shit? I have never asked that question, and

I've asked it a lot, and been given an answer of anything other than the bare

minimum. I've never once had someone say, I am paying this person well, I am

paying this person at market or above market or well above market, and they're

still not doing their jobs. It is always, well, we're paying them what we can

afford.

Well, then your business is failing. 'Cause if the only way you can run it is

to grossly underpay people, you're bad at business. You're doing it wrong. And

then you wanna blame your employees for the fact that you are bad at business

and underpaying them as a result? Next time somebody wants to insist to me that

people aren't capable of being autonomous at home, or people need to be

micromanaged to do their jobs— and it's not just next time, it's every time—

it's one question: what are you paying them? You seem to be okay with something

that the rest of the world really isn't. There's the platitude— whatever people

say— "Don't get into fights with pigs. You end up messy and the pig enjoys it."

That is my general take of people on the internet who are not saying things

directly to me, especially on Facebook.

[Allison] Arguments with dudes on the internet. Arguments with dudes on the internet.

[Allison] Arguments with dudes on the internet.

For the most part, I'm like, I'm just gonna block you and move on. You don't

want anybody to tell you any different. You're not gonna listen. You are too

deeply entrenched in whatever white nationalist version of 2026 you wanna be

living in. And so me reminding you otherwise is not gonna benefit anyone. And

that is usually my take. Except I don't know what happened with the fucks I

normally give, but they seem to have escaped. And I have found myself not

arguing with people on Facebook because I don't care what they have to say back.

They're just bad people. It's fine. But just being like— doing that thing where

you're like, "I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not— yeah, I'm going to. Yeah,

I'm gonna. I have to. I can't not." Like, these people who have been posting

that they picked the Turning Point USA halftime show, the consolation prize

halftime show for butthurt white people who don't realize that 14% of our

population speaks Spanish in their homes and 22% of our population speak a

language other than English in our homes. So it is not like you are not running

into people who don't speak English or who don't speak English as their primary

language. They're everywhere, especially Spanish.

We would not have so many forms translated into Spanish if we didn't have that

many people who prefer to speak Spanish, and that is not a problem. That is not

a problem.

[Allison] Arguments with dudes on the internet.

Most of the people who signed up— and if you signed up to be part of the

alternate halftime show, you don't get off the hook. Fuck you, dude. But also,

most of the people backed out because they got so much hate for doing it. They

were like, yeah, no, this is not what we meant to do. We meant to be quietly

hateful, not outwardly hateful. Sorry, our mistake. We'll do a better hateful

next time. But then on top of it, it was headlined by a guy who wrote songs

about being a pedophile.

When your president was recently identified in a giant dossier of documents as

a goddamn pedophile. And these are the people who are fighting for traditional

family and the whiteness of America. Hmm. Yeah, for some reason that in

particular has broken my brain in a way that the filter that is usually like,

this stupid internet person is not going to care that they're wrong or that

they're a bigot or that everything that they are saying is hateful and racist.

They're not going to care, so just walk away. My fingers do not do the walking.

They do not. I have been doing the internet antagonizing, and I apologize.

Not to the people I'm doing it to— they deserve it and they deserve more. I

wish for them much more antagonizing, I'll put it that way. Like, it's not

benefiting anybody for me to argue with these people, it really isn't, but it

does make me feel better for like a second. And some of it is on business groups

that I'm in, and people are like, why are we talking about the halftime show in

a business group? And I'm like, because if you suck, I want to know before I

spend my money there. I do not want my money to support people who actively

suck. So if you could let me know which one you watched, so that when I am

selecting a plumber, I am picking the plumber who doesn't suck or only uses

suction to fix my plumbing issue. That would be my strong preference. Anybody

who thinks that there is such a thing as things that are not political has never

had a hard day in their lives.

Fuck you very much. I am going to make decisions on where I spend my money

based on who it is supporting. And if that means that you have a Trump bumper

sticker on your work car, I will find another— whatever job you do that I would

see your work car, which might be a stretch because I don't leave my house or

look outside very often, but you know the point. I'm gonna apologize to the

universe for laying down with pigs because they do enjoy it, because getting

people angry is their goal. But I will remind you, to all of the people who are

butthurt that we allowed a country that does not have a national language to

feature in a private sporting event— a privately owned company— the NFL is not

publicly owned, meaning it is not a government entity. A private company was

allowed to pick somebody who does not sing in English. They were permitted to

allow him to put on a concert that— if that is a problem for you because it

doesn't center you in it, equity feels like oppression when you are the

oppressor. So you're butthurt because something isn't about you for once, and

that's okay.

Please go be butthurt somewhere else and not on my feed. And now we'll go to

Allison, who has this week's Small Talk. A question from Nate in Provo, Utah: "I

don't trust compliments at all. If someone praises me, I assume they're wrong or

being polite, but criticism sticks forever. How do you recalibrate that without

swinging into arrogance?" I don't think you need to worry about swinging into

arrogance. That is not a thing that's gonna happen. I probably could swing into

arrogance pretty easily, but I think that is a very human thing.

Somebody can tell you 10,000 good things about yourself and you're like, "Yeah,

maybe." And then someone says your feet smell and you're like, "Uh, that has to

be true." And that's just the way we're wired. Negative things outweigh positive

things in importance to us. And it is because we assume that everyone is out

there saying awful stuff about us and they just haven't told us yet. And so when

someone says something nice to us, we're like, well, you're probably gonna leave

and say something shitty, right? That's how this works. No, the reality is that

when you're not immediately standing in front of someone, they're probably not

thinking about you and they probably have nothing to say about you. And if it's

somebody who is a garbage enough person to say things out there that they

wouldn't say in here to you, then their opinion probably doesn't matter anyway.

In the grand scheme of things, people don't have time to think about you and

don't have time to make opinions about you.

Everybody's just trying to survive. There is this internal training that we

have that people are only telling the truth when they're saying something awful.

And if you've spent any time on the internet at all, you'll know that that's not

true, because a lot of people say awful things just because it gets them

attention. We can't give more credibility to the awful things than we do to the

good things. I think the question is not, how do I get more used to this without

swinging into arrogance, but instead, "How do I start believing that I actually

am worthy of all of these things that are being said about me? That I am not

just making it up and taking compliments that I don't deserve?" There aren't a

ton of people out there who give compliments that are unearned. There just

aren't.

People are not generally effusive about things that they don't like or don't

enjoy or don't think were done well. If you would've believed them if they were

saying something awful, you should believe them if they say something nice. But

also, I say this about imposter syndrome a lot because there are a lot of people

walking around with this imposter syndrome telling them that everything they've

done in their career was just a series of failures that other people didn't

notice, and that they have failed at everything they've done. They've made it

all up. They're a giant fraud in the role or the position that they're in, and

they're just waiting for somebody to find out. That is actually arrogance

because that means that you are so much smarter than every other person that you

have encountered that they could repeatedly miss that you are bad at everything

that you do. The universe is so very much on your side that it has allowed you

to repeatedly fail without any of the intelligent people around you noticing

that you're full of it. That didn't happen.

That can't happen. Nobody— you're not gonna repeatedly do a terrible job or

make things up and have nobody catch on throughout your entire career. You're

taking the power and the agency out of the people who have given you the

positions, given you the promotions, given you the raises, given you the

whatever in your career by thinking they must be wrong 'cause I'm just a giant

idiot. It's not true. It's not the way it works. To answer your question, I

don't think you're at risk of swinging wildly into arrogance because I don't

think that's how you're wired. If you have to ask this question, that is not how

you're wired. But also, if you would believe somebody when they said something

shitty about you, that means that if they said something nice about you, that is

also true.

And you don't get to pick and choose which one they're telling the truth on.

Don't worry about being arrogant— baseline believing that you deserve nice

things and compliments does not make you arrogant. Thanks for being here, guys.

Have a good day. Love you, mean it.