Welcome to Feedback Friday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with Feedback

Friday producer, The Dark Matter, helping me hold this galaxy of life drama together, preventing

this advice cosmos from flying apart, Gabriel Mizrahi. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode

the stories, secrets, and skills to the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from rocket scientists to four-star generals, arms dealers, drug traffickers, former jihadis. This week we had Danny Wrench.

He's actually one of the co-founders of Chess.com, international chessmaster, author of Dark Squares,

how chess saved my life. He grew up in a crazy, abusive, religious cult, and chess became his

escape, his path to survival, his career. This guy had a really wild journey from being a

traumatized kid to becoming a top chess player. It's a story of identity, brilliance, and

resilience. So much to talk about here. Really interesting guy. He was a two-parter. We also did

a skeptical Sunday last Sunday on test prep books and courses. On Fridays, though, we share stories,

take listener letters, offer advice,

play obnoxious soundbites, and hypothesize as best we can about the murky physics that govern

this beautiful universe of life conundra. Before we kick off, I wanted to share something really

fascinating that Gabe sent me this week. So there's this guy named Adam Alexic. He's a linguist,

influencer. He probably hates that word as do I, but he runs an Instagram account called Etymology Nerd, where he creates these cool videos that break down the origins of words. But these days, he's talking more about how language and culture and meaning impact one another in general. And I've only just kind of discovered him. Gabe, you've been following him for a while, yeah? It seems pretty interesting. He's great. I'm a big fan. I've learned so much from this account. It's fascinating. So he made this video recently about the comment section on the internet. And it's kind of, you know, I've always sort of suspected something along these lines, but basically what Adam explains. And I'm taking his word for all this, but he cites a bunch of studies and he seems like a smart cookie, so I'm inclined to trust him. What Adam says is that we often think about the comment section as some type of neutral forum, when actually there's a very specific type of person who tends to show up in the comment section. And that person, first off, they skew unemployed because, you know, they have time to comment on random crap on the internet, but also they tend to be more privileged, since they're more used to voicing their opinions in

public, which means they're more comfortable participating in debates and conversations online.

Meanwhile, just like women in real life are conditioned to speak up less.

And I know there's a ton of research on that.

Women on social media are also socialized into being less likely to pop off in the comments section. Plus, they have to worry more about harassment and

cyberstalking and all that stuff. And so what that means is there's a disproportionate percentage

of men, unemployed men, in the comments. So that might seem obvious. And maybe you're like,

okay, that makes sense, but so what?

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