#748 - Rob Henderson - How Privileged Thinking Drives Our Entire Culture

26:31And so yeah, the people who were supporting the defund the police movement, largely college educated, living in safe communities, living in gated communities, there were reports during the political unrest in 2020 and all of the BLM demonstrations and so on, all of the riots that people in like rich people in Chicago were hiring private security to patrol their neighborhoods because the police were either distracted due to all of the social unrest in crime that was occurring or because police were retiring and so on. And so they were hiring private security in these rich neighborhoods. And then in New York City there were reports of people just fleeing to the Hamptons like, you know, if you have money and you have resources, you can just flee to your private little gated area and from home start tweeting about defund the police and get all the likes and plot it from there.

27:18Oh my god, just so caring. I know the cops are so wrong. Like they're treating these poor black people so badly. And you can, I mean, I think people who are sort of affluent upper middle class people, they have a mistaken view of what sort of poverty looks like. Their only exposure to it is when they see, when they see it reported in the media, when And it's a criminal who's committed some kind of transgression and that surfaces up. And then they learn about the criminal's backstory and they start to feel sympathetic and so on and so forth. And there's not nearly as much time spent on the victims of that person's crime.

27:54And so often what happens is that in at least the imagination of this stratum society that they conflate poverty with criminality and the reason why someone commits crimes is because they're poor without really digging into the data or the research and understanding that with the vast majority of poor people never commit any crimes. They're far more likely to be victims of crime than a perpetrator, and they don't really think about this. And then through the sort of portrayal of poverty, I think in pop culture is kind of mistaken too, at least in more sort of recent media, where very few TV shows, it's just not exciting to see some working class person making minimum wage, going to work, clocking in, clocking out, going home to their family and living a normal life, but it's more interesting to see the struggling schoolteacher who decides to break bad and start cooking math and lashing out with the system.

28:47That's just a much more interesting story. There was this movie that came out. I think it was last year, the year before, Emily the criminal with Aubrey Plaza. I don't know if you saw it, but it was the perfect kind of movie for this, the luxury belief class. It's this young woman who works in food catering and she has this dickhead boss, and she has dream, I think she is a college graduate. She has dreams of being an artist, but she has difficulty monetizing her artwork, and so she caters food, but then she gets hooked in with this gang and learns how to shop lift. And the whole thing is like, well, screw the system.

29:21I can't make money off my artwork, and I have to work in food catering. This is just ridiculous. So I'm gonna start stealing and robbing people, and the movie is portraying this as a perfectly reasonable course of action. right? It's basically like breaking bad but the young woman version. For art. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I just think it's that's part of what drives the luxury police phenomenon. Yeah, Wildman. And when you see that, you really can't and see it. Mary Harrington had this about a lot of the advances that were proposed by the whom the impact wouldn't affect them. So a perfect example is, I guess the push toward independence and the derogation of chivalry by men.

30:12Because chivalry in some ways can be patronizing, must be patronizing to women. Like I can open the door for myself. I can carry my own bags, right? Like I can pull my own chair out. I can pay for my own dinner. And in a world where women are trying to find and establish themselves socioeconomically as independent agents, aside from the husband or partner that they're supposed to need, I can understand why that would be the case. But as she said, it is a direct line from men shouldn't open the door and don't need to, to why you shouldn't hit your wife, right? Because the consensus is women are more fragile, vulnerable and need to be protected.

30:50And men should be the ones that do that protecting. And it's the women who are married to men who had a two -parent household who had a relatively good example of how to treat women when they were growing up, who have been through all of the institutions that have kind of softly embedded what shivalry is in any case, because that's just the way that a more sophisticated social life goes. But that doesn't think about women who are in an underclass or working class environment, who are in relationship with a guy who never knew his father, whose mum was cycling in and out of different boyfriends or partners or whatever in the house, who was maybe abused physically or verbally or emotionally or whatever, while they were growing up, all of whom's friends are ruffians that are going about and anti -social behaviour and all of this stuff.

31:37And it's like, well, I know that for you, lady, the drives of Mercedes -Benz, you might like the idea of being liberated from men holding the door open for you, but downstream from that, you've also liberated women from being protected from their underclass partner, from hitting them when he gets annoyed on a night time. And I really, I just thought that that was such an interesting frame. The same thing goes for support for abortion rights. Right? When you think about that, it's like I think that it is skewed toward the people in the upper class believe that it is a great idea to restrict abortion rights overall, to give less access.

32:15But you think, well, maybe if you were woman 213 of one particular village somewhere, who's six kids deep, to three different men, maybe easy access to birth control would be a good thing for them to have. And yeah, it's just, it's so interesting how it can be split up by race, or it can be split up by class, or it can be split up within gender. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, I mean, And it's interesting because I think that a lot of the people who promote these views or who think that these are sort of progressive or fashionable or enlightened, they don't think about how it would affect someone outside of their social strata.

32:57Or they mistakenly overextend the way that they think to everyone else that, well, here's what would be good for me or here's what would be good for my class or my group and therefore it would be good for everyone. Or the only reason why other people aren't thinking like me or aren't pursuing the same kind of life is me is because they don't have the same, or because my preferences aren't implemented in society or throughout culture. I mean, yeah, would you say earlier about Mary Harrington's point is interesting. I mean, I saw this firsthand that where I grew up, basically anyone, anyone like, you know, who was remotely sort of academically inclined, you know, went off to some state university, everyone who wasn't, but still had some sort of restlessness or ambition.

33:38They joined the military. And then all the guys who are left behind, I mean, there's not much left for the women there to pick from. And a lot of these guys did grow up without dads or without good sort of male role models around. And yeah, I mean, yeah, what ends up happening often is like, you know, women get, you know, they have children with multiple men or the men, you know, they have multiple partners and don't interact with their kids. I mean, I, you know, I now have friends that I graduated from high school with who are these guys. And yeah, it's just, it looks very different, right? Like that sort of liberation and the belief that, you know, women don't need a man or men shouldn't, you know, women can live the same kind of life as a man.

34:19And maybe it's true if you are affluent and you go off to college and you're going to be a young professional career driven person. But if you're just working a menial job and you're not, I mean, most people aren't going to derive a ton of satisfaction from the way that they make money. Well, there's a story that you, I remember you telling me maybe about some lady friend that you'd spoken to about, she said that we should be able to move beyond the nuclear family because it's restrictive and constraining. Yeah, yeah, this was someone I graduated from, you know, with. We were somehow got on the topic of family and future and this kind of thing.

34:57and she was basically telling me that, yeah, marriage is this outdated patriarchal institution and we should, society should move beyond it, we should evolve, get past it. I asked her, well, how did you grow up? What was your family life situation when you were a child? She said, I was raised by my mom and my dad and I did have that conventional family. and then I asked her what she planned to do later in her, you know, once she was planning to, she was working at a technology firm, she was gonna go to law school, but I asked her in her future when she has a family or if she wanted a family, what would she do?

35:35And she said, oh yeah, I do want a family someday and I'll probably get married and have a husband and essentially get married and like, you know, partake in this outdated patriarchal institution. And so I was thinking that, okay, you benefited from this age -old ancient sort of patriarchal, but this institution, and you plan to carry the benefits of that arrangement forward for your own children. But your official public position is, no one should do this, it's outdated, she was sort of denigrating it, trying to downplay it, saying other people shouldn't do this. And to me, it seemed very duplicitous that this clearly marriage has positive benefits.

36:14I mean, that was something that I learned when I got to college, was almost every single one of my classmates and peers came from two parent families, whereas right group, it was basically zero. And so clearly marriage had some, you know, some kind of effect here. And yet the place, the, the, the group that is the most likely to downplay the benefits of marriage are the most likely to be products of successful marriages under the most likely to form marriages themselves. How come you're not more bitter about your childhood? I mean, I used to be, I used to actually be more angry when I was in my late teens, early 20s.

36:57I mean, I think part of it was just getting older. I think just age, just things just kind of tend to like burn out in dim over time anyway. And I think, you know, the other was just a lot of sort of self -focused work, self -improvement, and trying to get past it and put it all into context and realize that on the one hand, people are responsible for what they do in their lives. But on the other, I mean, to understand the sort of, to understand the genealogy of the ideas that led us to this point, that's been helpful to understand that, yes, like day day we have agency over our lives, but there are these decisions and cultural trajectories and all of these other forces that are in place that play a role too.

37:52And so when I start to dig at the root of this, who is responsible for some of these ideas, who promotes the luxury beliefs and so on and entering institutions where I can see it, it helps me to just understand it. And I think that sort of settles my anger a bit too. It's very interesting thinking about that. I had a C -Rot traveler on. She's a psychotherapist pushing back very hard against what she calls Instagram therapy, which is identifying everybody as victim and that they've got trauma and stuff. And she said, remembering that you experience trauma isn't being a victim, making your identity out of it is.

38:36Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's well put. I mean, I didn't really, I didn't really think of myself as a victim. And people didn't call me a victim. I never thought in those terms until I got to college before that, it was just day to day life. I mean, it was just, you know, trying to struggling to get by, trying to make money, trying to, whatever, living paycheck to paycheck. And then later, joining the military. And, you know, just my, my plate was full later, you know, sort of towards the end of my enlistment before I entered college, I did do a stint in rehab and I talked to therapists and I did sort of address a lot of the issues that I had experienced when I was a kid.

39:16That was helpful too, I think, to just sort of contextualize it and also to just sort of be more open with the people I grew up with and close with, my sister and my mom and all these people to just, in my adoptive family, to talk to them about all of this. That's helpful too. I think there is this tendency for young people, young men in particular that self -sufficiency will solve all your problems to just be completely self -reliant. You don't have to rely on anyone. Your relationships are sort of peripheral. And I lived that way for a while and it probably did help to sort of, I don't know, led me to equip myself to be a self -sufficient person.

39:58but later, I did realize that actually relationships are important. I mean, I went through the first six years after I left home. I never visited for the holidays. I never visited for any special occasions. I did visit on and off whenever, really whenever I suited my schedule, I was very selfish. But then later, now I make an effort. Now I make an effort to do all those things and realize that actually, you know, all of these things, relationships are more important than you think, especially when you're young, right? There is value there, even if you think there isn't. Yeah, there's a degree of romanticism about monk mode and loan -rangering it.

40:41And I think my current theory on this is that monk mode is a great tool, but a bad master, because because if you continue to pray at the altar of it over a long enough amount of time, the reason that you're doing some equivalent of monk mode, which is a overreliance on self -sufficiency, introspection and isolation so that you can focus on making yourself into a better version of you, because quite rightly, there are a lot of distractions out there in the world. If you're trying to do a ton of self -work or you're going to therapy or you're in rehab, you're probably not going to have the most flourishing social life.

41:17It's going to be difficult for you to juggle all of these plates. And if you do try and juggle all of the plates, you're going to restrict your progress in that area. Like committing yourself to one thing, or a very narrow band of things, is more than, it's not additive, it's multiplicative. Right? It allows you to triple down, quadruple down all of your efforts into one very tight area. And I found myself, toward the end of my 20s, through my manopause, that I really, really enjoyed monk mode. But I saw, especially for someone that has introverted tendencies and I get my energy mostly from being on my own a lot of the time, that it started to become more alluring to me than being back out into the world.

41:54But the problem with that is the reason that you're doing the monk mode thing or the rehab thing or whatever is to form yourself into a functional member of society who can then go and reintegrate. And that's the problem that the progress can become addictive to the point where it stops you from doing the thing, the thing that you're doing is sacrificing the thing that you are doing it in order to get. Yes. Yeah. You sort of mistake the means for the end, the end goal. Yeah. I think it's difficult to keep that in mind. I think a lot of people have difficulty with that, especially when you're young.

42:29What are your actions attempting to accomplish? Which are overarching goal? You know, Robert Green makes that distinction between tactician versus strategist, right? The tactician is just what's directly in front of you, what do you need to do next? And the strategist is, well, what's all of this for? Like, what are each of those steps trying to get you to? And I think, yeah, when you're young, you just think, oh, I want to make money. And like, money becomes the thing. And it's like, well, what's the money for? Like, what do you want to do with that money? When you build up your bank account, what is that the goal is just to have a big number on your balance?

42:58Or is it to take care of your loved ones, to have the freedom to be able to interact with people that you care about and to provide and those kinds of things. And I think I kind of came to that realization when I was in my mid -20s, but it wasn't until my later 20s, really probably right, not until I was about to start grad school. I was like 20, 28, but I really had that realization that, oh, the reason why I'm working so hard and trying to get educated and successful and trying to make money and all these things is so that I could take care of my current family, my adoptive family, but then also, for if and when I have a family later, I'll say when, that I'll be able to take care of them too, in a way that I lacked when I was a kid.

43:40And that's what ultimately all of these things are for. It's not just to whatever increase the numbers on my social media or on my balance or something like that. So you'll background the life that you went through to where you ended up.

43:58FOS, FOS, USFOS, GI Bill, Yale, Cambridge, PhD, book, you know, it's going to be an amazing selling book, all the rest of the stuff. What do you attribute that trajectory to given that your friends with so many of the people that you grew up with that are still the guy, they're that guy with three baby mommas and a bunch of alimony or whatever and they're in the same in the same whatever, what was formative or what do you attribute the change in you to that the other people didn't? I mean, there are probably, you know, there's a variety of factors. I think one is, you know, you do need to have like a certain amount of like innate drive ambition in the first place.

44:48And that I'm not entirely sure you can drill that into people. So you have to have that sort of raw material in the first place. But one point that I try to make in the book is that things could have very easily gone in a different direction. I think having sort of aptitude and drive an ambition, those are necessary but not sufficient that there are a lot of guys I think who are sort of smart and talented and ambitious, but they're just surrounded by chaos and disorder and you know lack opportunity or they've just been sort of beaten down by life so much that they don't even think to like spot the opportunities that are around you and capitalize on them.

45:24So that was there. So I think some of the raw material was probably there. Then the other thing was just making this kind of halfway and pulsive decision when I was 17 to just enlist and get out of my hometown. I kind of knew that at this point, I had had two jobs when I was in high school. I was a dishwasher at a restaurant and then I was a backboy at a grocery store. I kind of looked around at my coworkers who were a little older than me. these were guys, you know, this kind of guy in their early to mid 20s. You know, maybe they like some of them like they were like 24, but had a girlfriend in high school and they were just like kind of creepy, weird stoner guy or the guy who, you know, would write a dirt bike and, you know, just like smoke a lot of weed in the parking lot and just, you know, kind of aimless in a drift.

46:07And I thought like I, I think now when you're 17 or 18, that's kind of cool to live that life. But when you're 24, 28, like that's kind pathetic and even when I was a teenager I had that thought that yeah sometimes my friends and I would ask these guys to like get us beer hook us up with weed or whatever and you know some part of me I was I was like happy they were doing it but on the other hand I was like why are you doing this for us man like what kind of loser is hanging out with a bunch of high schoolers and I don't want to be like the weird old guy at the high school party when I'm that age and so you know a variety of factors led me to just in list right away I barely graduated high school.

46:45I mean, I was smart. And that's the other point that I try to make in the book is that a lot of people want to blame the school system or that there's something wrong with teachers or we aren't paying them enough. And maybe some of those things are true, but teachers aren't dumb. Like, most teachers get into that profession because they care about kids and they want them to do well. And they're usually pretty observant about like which kids are sort of curious and academically inclined. And my teachers could see that in me, but I just had no motivation or desire to do well in school. It just wasn't there for me.

47:19And so my teachers were just, you know, continually frustrated by me. And so, yeah, I enlist, I get out of there, basic training, I get stationed, I spend some time overseas and sort of have that structure around me. A couple days ago, I spoke with a mutual friend of ours, Paulina, a pompoliano, and she asked me this question of, when I read your book and I read about what you were like when you were a teenager when you were in high school. And then I meet you now, like it just doesn't, like there's a disconnect, I don't understand it. And I explained that I was in the Air Force for eight years.

47:52Like that's a long time. Like I was in from 17 to 25. And you know, the book I kind of like gloss over because it's kind of mind numbing and boring, but it's like, you know, make your bed, you know, like make sure your uniform is, you know, perfect. And like every other page of some bootcamp. Exactly. It is kind of like that, especially for the first six months to a year when you're in training. It's like you're not a person. You're just like a cog in this machine of just like, you know, like cleaning and being meticulous about every little aspect of your existence. And I hated it. I hated every second of it.

48:27But it was important for me to go through that to learn the skills that I kind of lacked when I was growing up of just like, here's how to be an adult, here's how to take care of yourself, here's how to dress properly, and even basic things, right? But what would the most surprising, I think this would be a nice framing actually, as you move up through the cacophosphere of different social strata, what were the most surprising realizations going from Rob 1 .0 to Rob 2 .0, which is I guess from teenager to being in the Air Force, what would the things be like, oh my God, that's an expectation or a social convention or that's a way of operating, or it's a belief, or whatever.

49:10I mean, I think probably one of the bigger ones was learning the distinction between self -discipline and motivation because I lacked, I really lacked both when I was a teenager. I didn't feel motivated to do well, but I also had, I had no external discipline around me. I mean, I had it in sort of fits and starts in different periods. It was just a very chaotic early life, But I had no self -discipline, certainly. Like I couldn't impose on myself. It just, I didn't have the tools to do that. But then in the military, I learned it that, at first it was imposed from on high that this is how you will do things.

49:47And then it gets drilled into you and then you just learn on your own. Like, oh, this is how you get things done is, motivation is, so the distinction, the motivation is just a feeling. It's like, do I wanna do this or not? And if I don't wanna do it, I lack the motivation and I'm just not gonna do it. where self -discipline is, I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel. And so, you know, for some people, it may make sense in the context of like going to the gym, that I don't feel like going to the gym today, but self -discipline is, it doesn't matter how you feel. Like, oh, you have a feeling who cares, like, what are your actions?

50:17What are you actually going to do now? Ignore those feelings and do what you've set out to do. And so it was like that for my work, for things like, I mean, even showing up to work on time. I mean, it's kind of sad, but I was one of the better workers at my jobs in high school. And even then, I was like, not on time half the time. Like it didn't matter. I didn't feel like it. And then the military was, if you don't show up to work on time, you get court martial and you go to military prison, like that's the life. And once I learned to operate by those standards and those regulations, those policies that It dawned on me that actually, you know, Jocco has this phrase, Disciplineables Freedom, that once you sort of outsource all of your decisions to this sort of regimented system, then suddenly like life gets better and you do have more freedom, you have the freedom to think about other things or to direct your attention to certain projects or goals or ideas and you don't have to live your life in this constant state of chaos of, oh, I don't have any money.

51:15Now, you know, like that, you just set the, set the system so that your money goes here and this is what you're going to do when you go to work at this time and this is when you leave and this is what's and having that regimented system was really important for me. And now I just you know I do it. It's like a nature to me but it took eight years to get there. So yeah I think those those those kinds of things discipline was the big one. What do people who didn't grow up in poverty not know about what it's like to grow up in poverty? I mean, I think poverty is... It's an interesting question because I think a lot of people actually attempt to...

52:01They attempt to imagine it. I know a lot of people actually who didn't grow up poor, but who at least try to imagine what it would have been like to be poor. Or, um, and I think like the imagination probably isn't too far off from the reality that there are certain things that you want, but maybe you can't get, or if you want a toy, or a certain food, or a certain thing that, you know, I think poverty now for at least in sort of developed first world countries, very few people are actually starving in the street, but it's more like, you know, I want to get, you know, maybe it's like a special occasion and I want to rent a video game at Blockbuster, but that's $6 and we're only going to let you rent a movie because it's $3.

52:42Like those kinds of weird small things, and you can only go on a special occasion for your birthday or something. It's not like a weekly occurrence. The other thing is like the, I think like the social environment is something people don't think about as well, that what family life and communities look like and pour on working class areas now are much different than they used to look like. I mean, I cite this statistic in my book about how in the 1960s, 95 % of children in the US, regardless of social class, were raised by both of their birth parents. And then by 2005, for the upper class, it had dropped to 85%.

53:27So there was a slight dip, but by and large, that's the norm still. Whereas for working class, families in the US working class children, it dropped from 95 % to 30%. And that was 2005. My guess is it's dropped a little bit further than that now. And so just to give sort of a glimpse into this, I mean, there was, I had five close friends growing up in high school. And so there was me sort of raised in foster homes and adopted, but there were divorces and other kinds of drama. I had two friends raised by single moms, one friend raised by single dad. I had another friend who was raised by his grandma because his dad was in prison and his mom was addicted to drugs.

54:09That's kind of like the normal situation when you go to a high school and one of these areas and just start asking people about their parents or their families, they'll start describing about dads in prison or moms in drugs. I'm staying with my aunt right now because my mom is in rehab or whatever. Very chaotic. Yeah. It's just total. Yeah, it's just totally chaotic and disorderly. And this is a point that I've made in my writing is that childhood poverty is not, and again, this is in the context of the US and first world countries that childhood poverty is not really a very strong predictor of harmful to detrimental outcomes later in life.

54:50The correlation is either very weak or not significant at all between growing up poor and growing up to commit crimes or self -defeating behaviors, harm, violence, drug addiction, unemployment, all of these kinds of social pathologies. There's a very sort of tenuous connection there, but for childhood instability and those undesirable outcomes, there's a strong and consistent correlation there. there. And so childhood instability is measured by things like, you know, were you raised by both of your birth parents? Was there a divorce? How many different adults moved in and out of your home? How frequently did you relocate?

55:31Basically, how much day -to -day disorder was there in your life? How much uncertainty was there? And that actually does seem to have a very strong effect on the childhood development, on their expectations, on their goals for themselves. And what's interesting is that when researchers control for childhood, family income, the link remains strong, it remains significant between instability and outcomes. And so one way to think about this is, if there's a rich family, but there's a lot of drama in chaos and divorce and addiction and domestic issues, a child raised in that environment is much more likely to have detrimental outcomes, more likely to commit crimes or become addicted to substances or just have issues children out of wedlock or multiple partners versus a child who was raised by two very low -income parents who are married who are very focused on creating a stable and secure life for their kids.

56:30And you can kind of see this, I think, with immigrant families and low -income families that haven't really been quite afflicted by a lot of the pathologies that have occurred in the US. And so I think that's important to remember too. It's that, yes, there's this poverty component, but there's also just this kind of, sometimes I wonder if poverty is even the right word for the way that I grew up. I think squalor is probably a more accurate term. It's like, you know, there was a bit of that material in poverty, but it was more just And people like living in a very kind of ugly and almost like massacistic way of just, you know, careless and impulsive and, you know, sort of drug -addled.

57:13What's the mechanism that you think is causing that to happen? What is it about? It's so universal that this unstable, disorganized upbringing regardless of class or material wealth seems to have such negative impacts predictively done. What do you think is the mechanism there? I mean, you know, I probably some of it would be genetics, but I'm not sold that it's a hundred percent. People that are quick to anger, externalizing behavior as parents give the raw materials of externalizing behavior to kids, right? Yeah, I think that's pretty good. I think that's like one piece of it, but I think that it's a plumber and And I think yeah, that would be the Robert Plumman answer.

58:01But I do think that that can't explain a hundred percent of it because if you just, for example, if you just look at white Americans over time, like all of the same things have occurred across social classes that actually 50, 60 years ago, I mean, I'll give you an example just for my adoptive family. So my adoptive family are basically white working class people on my mother's side. And so my grandparents, you know, they were, you know, they, they, they grew up basically during the Great Depression and they got, you know, but they got married. I mean, I'm like my grandfather and my grand, they would tell me the story about how my grandfather asked my grandmother to marry him.

58:40And I think he was 18 or 19 and she was like 17 and she, you know, they were just like two, the only two young people in this town. And you know, and she was like, I'll marry you, but you have to, you have to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop gambling. and he was like done and done. They got married and they had a 60 plus sex. That's a sex. Yeah, that's exactly. Well, yeah, they had, I think they had four or five kids. Yeah, that's four kids. And they were married for 60 plus years, no issues. I'm sure they had issues, but like, you know what I mean? And then they had four kids, all four kids divorced.

59:16And you know, they did get married, but then they ended up getting divorced. You know, some of them had kids, stepkids, that kind of thing. Now I'm a member of the next generation and I'm seeing my cousins and it's like, it's not even marriage. It's just like, oh, like they hooked up and had a kid but he hasn't spoken to his kid in, you know, three years and, you know, so that's what it looks like now. And I don't think the genetics in this family lineage changed much. It was the social environment. It's the incentives. It's the denigration of marriage. It's, and I don't even, you know, people will point to economic factors but my grandparents were very, they were probably poorer than their parents.

59:52definitely poor than my cousins now. They could not afford the things that my same age, 30 -year -old cousins could afford. It wasn't an economic issue. I think a lot of it was just cultural. What are your expectations? I think a lot of it has to do with a lot of the stuff that you and I have talked about. You speak about on your podcast around incentives around sex and romance and dating. In the 1940s, 1950s, my grandparents generation, it was like, if you wanted to have sex, you had to like live life exactly. And that was just the reality then. And now it's completely different. And I've presented this thought experiment before.

1:00:33I think I posted this on back when it was still called Twitter, which was if you traveled back to 1945, you just got in a time machine and walked out in the post -war era. And you said, you know, very soon, I think it was 1960 when the birth control pill was invented. You say very soon it's going to be this magical technology the birth control pill So contraceptives will be widely available abortion will be you know, it'll be more accessible Certainly than it is now So you'll have you know the all of these reproductive options before you Do you think in the future there will be more children born out of wedlock or fewer?

1:01:11Do you think that there will be more abortions or fewer? Do you think there will be more children raised in foster homes or orphanages living in chaos and squalor, more or less. And I think almost everyone that you speak to in 1945, you present this survey, I think almost every one of them would say less, they would say fewer. And then, you know, but that's not the case. It was very much the opposite of that, that I think even these technologies and the culture and everything sort of went in a very different direction than I think people had predicted. Mary Eudestat came on the show and Adam and Eve and the pill revisited her new version of her old book.

1:01:54Fantastic. Just so great. And it's true, man. We look back and it's kind of cool in the Red Pill Manusphere, even in the AP world, the social psychology world, for people to to almost laugh, snigger at how rudimentary the thinking was in the 1960s that introducing birth control would result in better outcomes in terms of abortion, better outcomes in terms of out of wedlock births. But who then would have been able to predict that that was what was going to happen? You're talking like a fourth order effect, right? Not okay, so you're gonna decrease shotgun weddings because the onus is going to go from the male that accidentally impregnated to the woman who, quote, unquote, chose, right?

1:02:43It went from a man's mistake to a woman's option. And you go, okay, right, and then what's gonna happen to that and what's gonna happen to that way? It's like, it's so far down the line. I was talking to Scott Galloway, and he was talking about the predictive power of stuff in the past. And he was saying, he'd locked through, combed through some research about the Great Depression, and had looked for anybody. Anyone predict this? It's like the year before the Great Depression in the 20s, no one, nothing, not a Cassandra insight. And yet in retrospect, you go, how could no one have seen this coming?

1:03:19You know, hindsight is a wonderful thing with regards to that. One question that I've got that I think's kind of interesting is to squall your word up until the age of 16, 17, 17, until the age of 17, that should set a pretty low hedonic threshold, right? That you're in a nice air condition room and your jeans fit and don't have holes in. And you're not worrying about whether or not you can pay for the U, but to get from here to the airport. How have you found your ability to, uh, hedonically adapt over time? Like, can you recall that as an anchor for your quality of life, or does it almost seem like it's someone else that lived that?

1:04:05That's an interesting question. I guess it's a bit of both. I mean, it's a day -to -day, I think. I don't really reflect in that way. You know, you just sort of live your life. But when I reflect back and when I think about it, and I realize, you know, there are those moments where like, wow, like I can do this thing that I couldn't have done. You know, even after I was in the mill, I mean, I think the pay structure's probably changed a bit when I enlisted in 2007. I was, you know, to think that I was making like $1 ,200 a month was the pay. And so I couldn't afford a belt, you know? Like, it was like small little things like that.

1:04:43Like, you know, once I cover, you know, cause I moved, yeah, once I moved off base, like, I got this house with my friends, but you know, you have to pay like first, so yeah, it's so funny now, like it doesn't matter to me because I have money, but back then it was like panicking. It was like you have to pay the first month and the last month's rent up front. And then it's like a security deposit and then it's this and then you have to, and then like gas to commute back and all of these kinds of things and calculating all of this. And it's like, oh, well, I guess I can't wear a belt for a couple of weeks and come out next paycheck.

1:05:10It's like that, it sucks. And so there are times like that where I'm like, oh, I could just buy this without thinking about it. And that part is nice. So I think it is that kind of, like happiness researchers will do this. What is it like? They have terms for this. It's like life satisfaction versus, I think they may just call it happiness. Like happiness is like your actual affective state in the moment day to day. How much positive versus negative emotion are you experiencing subjectively throughout the day or the week or whatever? And then there's the life satisfaction component, which is basically when you step back and view your life as a whole, how satisfied are you?

1:05:48And those two things are correlated, but they're not quite the same in some ways. I think parents often report much lower levels of happiness, high levels of life side. Yeah, yes. And I think at that regard, it's like, you know, my happiness, I don't know if it's actually changed much. Maybe there is a bit of that hedonic adaptation where, you know, 15 years ago, it was like, oh, I can, you know, I can go to Wendy's. Cool. Like, I'm happy. Whereas now it's, you know, something else. But ultimately, that hasn't changed. But the life satisfaction, I'm sure, is much higher that like, oh, I've had a few accomplishments and I can afford things.

1:06:17I don't have to think about money as much anymore. And so, yeah, I think there is that. And it also like reminiscing too. Like when I talk to my sister, some of my old friends from high school and just sort of thinking about those days, it's like, you know, I do feel a bit better now about my life. I was talking to a friend and they're asking me stuff about my childhood. And my memory is really patchy for my childhood. It's not fantastic, especially not sort of pre -ten. And I said, it's luck. Like, what do you remember? I said, well, I remember a good bit because of my sister, because we'll prompt each other about, how do you remember that?

1:06:58Oh my God, yeah, we did do that thing. And we were in that car, or we got stuck in the model, whatever, right? And yeah, does it agree where I wonder how much is just one good chat GPT prompt away from me opening out into this really beautiful answer about some insight or whatever some experience that I had as a kid. But yeah, George Mack, my friend, once a month lies in bed before he wakes up for 10 minutes and imagines what it would be like to live with no arms or legs. That's one of his favorite meditations among among a bunch of other weird ones. So he's trying to dial up contrast as much as possible.

1:07:36Think about all of the challenges that I would have to face. Think about what this day is going to entail. Think about all of the things that would be difficult for me. Think about how grateful I would be if only I could just, you know, wash my own back. If I only I could brush my teeth, if only I could do these things. So what he's trying to do is give himself gratitude for the things that he takes for granted that are very normal. Now, the interesting thing with your example is that you don't need to imagine what it would be like to live in squalor Because you did. Yeah. But the way that our sense of self works, you know, what is it?

1:08:08Every seven years, every cell in your body has turned over. So there isn't even, you're like the two ship of Thesias, three, three ship of Thesias is away from the person that you were then. And even for me, now being in Austin for two years, I went back home for Christmas. And it's like, it's kind of like a fever dream. I'm being back in this place that I know so well, but I'm different, but I'm not. And then I find triggers, environmental triggers, causing me to fall back into other different ways of thinking and stuff like that. So I was interested in whether or not, basically you have been able to lock in a degree of gratitude, like relativistic gratitude, I suppose, based on where you came from, to where you are now.

1:08:50But it's a permanent battle. Like in some regards, from a poverty perspective, like you were a guy who was born with no arms or legs and then grew them. Mm -hmm. And yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, those, I think that yeah, that's, that's right. Where I, if I think about what it was like back then and I compare it to now, of course, like things are much better for me. And yeah, I mean, it's, it would be, it would be, I think, shameful to be anything other than completely grateful and, you know, just full of gratitude for the result I would like to think. Yeah, I mean, that's a weird one. Like the, like, you know, I think when, that, that's one of the things that, you know, And in the book, I point this out that like, you know, when you don't really grow up with parents and you don't really, I mean, because I grew up in foster homes before, I think like that critic, there's like the developmental window where if you don't really receive like positive feedback, like I think I just like, I receive compliments in a very weird way where it's like very hard for me to accept it.

1:09:46It's a skill. It's a real skill, man. Who is it that I gave someone a compliment? Fuck, I can't remember who it was. I gave somebody a compliment and I've never seen any, I wish I could remember who, but it would probably be a good idea that I couldn't call them out in any case. Dude, it's like the worst way that I've ever seen anyone take a compliment. Just, you know, you say this thing that you think is a nice gift that you're giving somebody, and even giving compliments is a skill that I've had to learn because I'm doing something that's nice for somebody else is a nice thing to do. Gwinder, it was fucking Gwinder.

1:10:19It was on an episode that I did recently. Okay. And I was like, dude, I fucking adore your writing. I adore your sub -stack. You've got two bucks coming out. I can't wait to read them. I'm fired up every single time I speak to you on the podcast. I love it. It's like a fugue state we drop into for two hours. It's brilliant. And I'm just sorry to face people can go watch the episode. And it's very charming. It's very charming. Like it's very charming because obviously he holds himself to a high standard and stuff like that. But you see it's guy you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very charming.

1:10:50Yeah. Well the other day I had this this interaction with one of my friends' mothers and You know, she was like very high energy and she was like oh, you know rob I love your writing and now it's like I love your sub stack and I watched you on you know what modern wisdom is like it's so great And at first I was like, you know, oh, that's nice. Thank you. You know trying to like change the subject I just like feeling all these compliments and I just feel uncomfortable and like that's really nice of you Thank you so much and she's like no really She's like, did you really get a PhD from Cambridge?

1:11:19Because that's amazing. And then I started to walk away feeling like, damn, I feel pretty good about myself actually. Like, can I have a hang around all the time? Eventually, I was like, I was suddenly getting this really positive mom energy. And I was like, this is great. Like actually. But it took a second, right? At first, I was like, you know, just fell into that sort of default. Like, oh, very kind of you to say. Thank you so much. And then she kept going with it. And I'm like, wow, this is a really nice sleep. That's sweet, man. You're like kind of the equivalent of a really obesity over weight person who can't just go into gym and do a little bit say hey we've got to shift 250 pounds.

1:11:50You need to stay on that treadmill for another hour mister and then you finish and you're like oh wow like yeah exactly there's like a crushing weight of compliments that you need but that's something I'd love to I've got um who wrote no mom no mom is a nice guy Robert Glover thank you I've got Dr. Robert Glover coming on the show soon I'm very excited to speak to him and I'd love to talk about the at the skill of both accepting and giving compliments. I think that that's a really underrated skill. The ability to give an earnest compliment and to graciously but honestly receive it. Right. Skill that no one really ever talks about.

1:12:29That is interesting. Yeah, I think from, at least my impression is it's actually easier to deliver a compliment than to be easier. Because you can be sincere about it. Like you can honestly show your appreciation if you enjoy something to tell someone. But yeah, I've, I've, yes, seen, this seems to be a common pattern that people have difficulty with, with receiving them. More so with guys maybe, than, than girls, although, that's an interesting one. Because with women, for sure, they, they hide ambition, they downplay success and stuff like that. Certainly female to female communication, I think there is more opaqueness and more fuckery that goes on with regards to that.

1:13:10If a guy thinks that you've done something shit, they go, do that with a lame. Whereas it might be couched in some other sort of language from a woman. Yeah, that'd be interesting. I'd love someone to look at since he versus instance, he compliments from comparing men and women. That'd be fascinating study. This morning I was prepping a newsletter. It'll go tomorrow. I do like a three interesting findings. Everyone needs to go to Rob's substack and subscribe. It's outstanding. Thank you, man. I shamelessly repurchased at least one thing every couple of weeks. I think, well, the findings are served as wide an audience as possible, but this was an interesting one.

1:13:45It'll go out where... So this was a study from 1988. I'd be curious to see, like, I couldn't find anything more recent, but essentially they broke down by gender, the domain of where people deliver their compliments. And so for women, it was when women compliment women versus when men compliment men, what are they complimenting? For women, it was a mostly appearance. It was like something like 60 % of the compliments were about appearance. And then it was like 15 % about possessions and 10 % about accomplishments and that kind of thing. Whereas, so it was mostly appearance based for women when they're complimenting one another.

1:14:20Whereas for men, it was mostly based on accomplishments. Most of their compliments to one another were about accomplishments. And so one thing that I would wonder is like maybe it's, I wonder if it's kind of easier or more difficult depending on. So I would imagine like for women when they receive compliments about their appearance because it seems to be the most common domain that they would receive those quite easily because they're used to it. Whereas for accomplishments that makes them feel uncomfortable in some way. And if you guy, if I go to you and I'm like, dude, you're looking buff. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

1:14:55Tell me about, tell me about how good my last news that I was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder if we would feel more uncomfortable when it's something other than the digital target. That's so fascinating. And yet again, it shows just how people's behavior zeroes in on the most salient parts of each sex's characteristics. So women are complimenting the most important thing to the opposite sex, men are complimenting the most important thing to the opposite sex. The same thing happens with derogation as well. You know, if there's an argument between a guy and a woman on the internet, the woman's gonna say he's got a small dick energy and the guy's gonna call her a slag.

1:15:33Right, that's it. I'm gonna derogate your chastity, I'm gonna derogate your sexual prowess. I'm going to say that you're not as competent or as rich or as good looking or as successful as you think you are. and I'm gonna say that you're like fat or older and ugly than you are. Why? Well, those are the most important things that you have with regards to social currency. And these are the same people who will throw these sorts of insults around. Like, you know, Greta Tumberg accused Andrew Tate of having small dick energy. Like, I think it's the third most liked tweet of all time or something like that.

1:16:05I think she's, I think she's in the top 10 twice. And I think Tate features in the top 10 twice I saw three times and at least maybe one or two of those are his interactions with Greta Tumberg. So kind of, I don't know, like, he's like the Michael Jackson to her Janet Jackson or something, very, very successful when they get together. Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, like we're, I think that, yeah, the same people who would probably endorse like some form of gender, blank slate, egalitarianism, or deny that there are any sort of biologically based sex differences is we'll still sort of target those.

1:16:42That's the same as the Harvard Extension School thing. Yeah. So yeah, so if you're a very progressive person, but then a man is annoying you online, you'll immediately start telling him that he's a virgin or he's a way to go. Yeah, exactly. Fucking in cell. Like, oh, okay. It's in cell, yes. Yeah. If you throw that debate around, speaking of that, Alexander Dates like just put a new study out. Did you see this one? He hasn't released the details, but he's capturing the data at the moment on it through a Google form. It's so funny. But videos up asking participants to rank the attractiveness of different red pill influences.

1:17:24So there's the guys from Fresh and Fit, who else is in there? I don't know, there's like a bunch of other people that are in there. And it's got the replies are so funny. I got a look at it. So it's on Twitter like these these Correct him mining for the day. Trish on Twitter the results on he's he's currently only put it out yesterday I think I gotta look at this and I'm curious. I dude. I have to see on there I really I'm not I'm not and he's not he went like more kind of it like I know the big names within that world or whatever but He is Alex has an ability I don't think I've ever seen you get into a spat on Twitter.

1:18:08I don't think I have. And I think you've ever had a back and forth, despite having like hundreds of thousands of people that follow you, Gwinda likes to kind of, he's more like a hitman, so he'll sit upon a ridge and look out and then he'll like fire something and it's like AOS, it'll be like a single reply to AOC with 500 likes from him and then nothing, he won't tweet for another week. Honestly, he pops out of the wilderness looks. He's like, adjust the site, fires, and then leaves. But I mean, Alexander goes in with in cells, in in cell co, that account that I think is the admin of the in cells .co .tank.

1:18:50He's back him forth with like anyone, like egg and non accounts. Like if he sees, and you've got this essay and it's really well written, but his capacity, He's kind of like the destiny of dating research. You know, he's just got this predisposition that's very good for being able to put up. For anyone that doesn't know who we're talking about, he's been in the show Alexander Date Psych. I think it's like Alex Date Psych on Twitter. Just look, whatever day this goes out on, look at who he's going tweets and replies and have a look at how many people he's arguing with. And I promise you, there'll just be mountains, like tons and tons and tons and it's no one.

1:19:23It's nobody. And then sometimes it's somebody. But I think he's performing a much needed service because I don't have the patience for that. I mean, I think like, you know, professors and researchers and podcasts, like just people who have like a million things to do. And I think like, but he's doing it very well and he's building an audience this way. And I think it's, he's channeling his knowledge and his research short productive ends. And, you know, I think it, I, someone should be engaging with a lot of these like black pills, you know, these people. It's a fucking high price. Yeah. Do you see that we got lumped into, we got given a name?

1:19:59What we do? Me, you, William Costello, and Alexander Date Psych, and it's the academic manosphere. Okay, good company. I like it. I think that's a pretty good way. I was in there, really. Yeah, I think so. Okay. I think you were. It was a long time ago in this day. It was like maybe months ago, and I forgot to send it to you. But yeah, the academic manosphere type, it was used as a slur, but I was like, yo, if you want this to be a slur, but make it less cool of a name. It's such fucking dope. I would have been a part of the academic minus fit. Yeah, I got lumped in a couple of years ago with, it was some like, you know, like someone was like, trying to create like a league of the IDW.

1:20:36This was back when the IDW was still, I think it was still a thing or it was kind of on the way down. It was like 2020, 2021. And yeah, it was like in the minor leagues. It was like, you know, there were heavy hitters, you know, there were air case, wine, stine, you know, there was string key. And then it was hitting it back then. I don't know what I have like 10 ,000 followers or something. It was like, that would have been probably after your university of Austin thing maybe or around about that time. It was before then even. It was like, you know, I think you and I had just met and it was like still kind of early days.

1:21:04And I was looking at this and like, I don't want to, you know, like, I like some of the people who are were whatever. I don't know if it's not really still a thing anymore, but I like some of those people. Like, I'm not really in this IDW big. Like, I thought that was kind of. So talking about you moving into the real, you know, upper stratosphere, troposphere of class, moving through your time in the Air Force. What about when you got to Yale first and then Cambridge, what was some of the conventions that really sort of stood out to you? Because I think this has informed a lot of your ability to sit back and look at these dynamics and go, oh, isn't that interesting because you have an anchoring bias to be able to compare it to.

1:21:46You're like, I saw this thing and then I saw this and then I saw that. So I'm actually able to observe these dynamics for what they are rather than kind of, I get to see code rather than matrix as opposed to have only ever grown up inside of the matrix. I see. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I arrived on campus 2015 as a mature student and it was so Asian. So looking like a normal age student. I think I had the beard back then. So I had like a full beard. You know, so this is like a very common thing with vets were like because you have to shave every day Inspect you to make sure it's like it better be like this morning you shave not last night kind of thing Yeah, and so as soon as I got on like you know Six months I didn't work out do I think I gained like 20 pounds like it was the first semester was bad where I was like I was like I don't have to work out anymore enough to shit.

1:22:33Yeah, it was really nice And then like I know I like look at the mirror like six months in I was like I got a fake This is not a joke. But the first six months it was glorious. And so, but yeah, I looked older, I was older, and the students, some of them would crack jokes about 21 Jump Street, you know, like that kind of thing. And yeah, it was, I think the first couple of months or so, nothing really unusual. But then, I saw this very strange, you know, like I mentioned before, like witnessed the kind of birth of this new politically correct movement where a professor had written an email, essentially defending freedom of expression on campus, it later became known as the Yale Halloween costume controversy on campus where this was October.

1:23:25The Yale administration released this email basically telling the students to, you know, not engage in any cultural appropriation, don't wear costumes that would be offensive to these groups. And then one of the faculty members on campus basically wrote an email just to her students and her residential college saying like, do we really need the administration interfering in our lives? Like, you're all adults. I trust that if you wear things that maybe you don't, other people don't like, you guys can just work it out amongst yourselves. Essentially defending freedom of expression. And in response, hundreds of students marched around campus calling for her to be fired.

1:23:57and later for her husband, Nicholas Christakis, to be fired, saying that she was racist, she was defending cultural appropriation, these students couldn't feel safe on campus. And they were using this kind of language, which I think now all of this stuff is kind of spilled out of the universities and we're all kind of familiar with all this sort of victimhood stuff. But back then, I was just completely flummoxed that was like, we're in danger, they're caused us pain, suffering, we're under immense harm. You know, this is like an emblematic of, you know, broader systemic forces that are working against and I'm looking at these students and like I know for a fact a lot of them were the sons and daughters of millionaires.

1:24:38I remember asking one young female student basically like, can you explain like why is this offensive? I don't understand and she basically told me I was too privileged to understand why, you know, why Erica Christakis's email was offensive while. And she was like some white girl who went to private boarding school, grew up in a rich neighborhood, but she was an activist and whatever. So she was like the titiana, McGrat, like that archetype, except went to Yale and everything. And that was an interesting thing too. On campus, the whole identity politics idea was that if you are a member of these certain sociological categories, then therefore you are conferred legitimacy to opine on all of the social lids of the world and how to fix them and so on.

1:25:33But then the students also placed a great deal of importance on lived experience. If you live through something in your life, then therefore you're able to speak about certain things, your authority on those matters. But those two things seem to be, to me, contradictory that, does it matter what you live through in your life or does it just matter what category you belong to? It's interesting that you had 17 year squalor legitimacy when it comes to lived experience, but the number one thing which is ignored is class. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, because there are so few people who had my kind of background on campus and because So few students and graduates of these kinds of universities ever encounter it It just isn't on their radar that they don't even think about.

1:26:25I mean what's really interesting was that Yale is located in New Haven Which is a really low -income kind of blue -collar town But you know they call it the Yale bubble where you know the students would only stick around in this very sort of in you know enclosed area But I lived off campus in an apartment downtown and so I would walk through like a lot of poverty a lot of squalor a lot of addiction and having 20 minutes earlier heard some students talk about how they were oppressed and then I'd see you know, real poverty and real suffering. And I was just very difficult for me to sort of reconcile those things and eventually, like at first I tried to be sympathetic and try to understand these, you know, these grievances and the students and the graduates and the faculty and all of you know, and then eventually I was like these people have, you know, they just completely don't understand.

1:27:15They have no connection with it whatsoever. And I'm some of it I think is legitimately malicious and duplicitous. I would see, for example, people claim that investment banks were emblematic of capitalist depression and say that these are just horrible entities. And then those same people would be at a recruitment session for Goldman Sachs like two weeks later. And I think like, you know, that to be was like, that was a calculated move. Like, and what have you by that? It's still want to look for them. Yeah. Like if they can basically eliminate their rivals for these prestigious internships, then all the better for them.

1:27:54So I think some of it was tactical and calculated. But I think for a lot of people, it's just, you know, their hearts are in the right place or they're not really thinking that much about it. And so yeah, this was, yeah, it was very strange. And then, and then the other thing is, so this is funny. I never knew my father growing up and I didn't know who he was or anything about him. And it was only recently I took a 23 in me and got the results and found that my father was Mexican. And I called up our mutual friend, Rizip Khan. I was like, hey, can you look at this with me and help explain. He was like, yeah, your dad was like Mexican.

1:28:32He was like indigenous from North America with some Spanish ancestry. That's like a perfect, and he's like, you grew up in LA, but what did you expect? And I was like, okay, so my dad was Mexican. But so when I was at Yale, before I had this information, I was hanging out in a dorm room with some students and it was a friend of mine who was a Mexican guy. And he was not like a, you know, he wasn't an activist, he wasn't like woke or whatever. But I took a Sembero off the wall and put it on my head. And he was joking around, but he said something like, hey, you know, that's culture appropriation.

1:29:01You can't wear that Sembero. I was like, oh my God, you know, just joking around. And then once I got these results back, I was like, wait a minute, I'm allowed to wear. I could wear that somewhere. I'm a lot harder to wear some bra. Get me a poncho, get me some fajitas. And then the next thought I had, yeah, but the next thought I had was like, this just shows how like how stupid the whole thing is in the first place, right? Like someone from my background who didn't know my father who could have been like, I could have believed. Like if I had believed in the cultural appropriation thing, I could have bought into it.

1:29:28And now what am I supposed to think? Now that I have these DNA test results. And then I, you know, it's just like the whole idea of like breaking people down into like these ethnic categories and they are or are not allowed to partake in this activity or that or the other. Like when there are people out there who actually don't know who their fathers are or don't know, they don't even know what cultural appropriation means, I just think like our attention and our resources and our time are spent on such frivolous nonsense. What is it that tyranny of small differences? What's that thing? Yeah, the narcissism of small differences.

1:30:03Yeah, the small of the differences between people, the bigger that they're blown up to be. When you have this relatively homogenous group of people at Yale, it's all to do it. You can't speak to her like that. It's like why? Like she's exactly the same as you, just that one grand mother's half -African -American. Or something. Yeah. Yeah. And everyone is from like the top, probably the top desial of income. I mean, at Yale, there are more students from the top 1 % of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60%. Almost everybody is either... I mean, yeah, this is an interesting point, the narcissism of small differences, where a lot of the anger I felt was it was like between like someone at the 90th percentile income who they were angry at that 99th percentile, right?

1:30:52Like, you know, whatever, like someone from a family of whatever doctors and lawyers who are sort of upper middle class who are angry that the children of billionaires get to do something a little more expensive or a little bit more, they get to go on a more expensive vacation. All of that was very much confined with people who are extremely affluent and well to do. And then there were a handful of people like me. I'm the only one who had the kind of life that I had, but I knew some people from more kind of blue collar background. The underclass bonus fides. Yeah, exactly. Who were really just kind of like lower middle class, blue collar, but not like, I mean, the thing is like the way that the system works is, I think we might have talked about this last time about just how few people, like only less than 3 % of foster kids graduate from university, less than 3%.

1:31:39And people who are from the bottom income quintile, it's 11%. And so, really, you're four times more likely to graduate from college if you're poor than if you live through the foster system. I mean, that's just how the odds are so stacked against you. And so, yeah, I mean, even the people I knew who, so I think I was one of like eight veterans on campus. You know, people think of the military as like, oh, kind of like people who maybe didn't go to college or people who had maybe sort of a more hard -scrabble life. Which is maybe to some extent true compared to people who go to expensive colleges, but I was so I was one of eight military vets on campus, but even when I would interact with the other vets and listed vets.

1:32:19In my cohort. So they were, yeah, eight in my cohort. And I would speak with them. I was like, oh, like basically all of them were raised by two parents and like, you know, had a mom and a dad who did prioritize a education and who kind of said good examples and all of those things. And I think, yeah, we focus a lot on, I think the left focus is a lot on economics. I think certain strands of the right will focus on behavioral genetics. But there is this sort of cultural component here too that people don't really seem to want to touch. At some point, I will write this post -up about sort of the limitations of sort of overextending the findings of behavioral genetics.

1:32:56I think like it's an important thing to know and to understand and to sort of be fluent in. But also to not discount the role of good habits, custom sort of good behaviors. I wrote this post, nobody's a prisoner of their IQ. And I think that's an important piece too, that it's true that the guys I grew up with, regardless of their parenting or whatever their economic conditions were, they probably weren't going to be in a position to go to a very expensive, you know, selective university, but I think if they had been maybe taught different values and inculcated different habits that, you know, two of them wouldn't have gone to prison, one of them was shot to death, I am friends working sort of menial low -income jobs.

1:33:47I mean, that's the sort of typical outcome of people in that community. And I don't think like maybe we can't necessarily really raised the ceiling for some people. We can definitely raise the floor, I think. Yeah. And so the last one of the last episodes I did in this room was with Destiny. And he prompted this idea that I named two -step potential theory, which is a blending of individual agency with real world limitations. Your efforts have tons of control over your outcome within the range that your world's limitations will allow. Behavioral genetics teaches us that on average, around 50 % of everything that we are, psychologically, is inherited from our parents.

1:34:19Boo, 50 % of our outcomes are limited by our genetics. yes, but that also means that 50 % of them are up to you. Which is great. This is another reason to not only compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to, who someone else is today, but it's also a reason to try lots of things until you find the intersection of something that you love and something that you're good at. And yeah, it's like, you can imagine that you have a bracket within which your potential sits. And that bracket is determined very heavily by outside forces. It's genetic predisposition, it's life circumstances, it's nutrition, it's upbringing, it's fucking unconscious trauma, all the epigenetics, it's all of that.

1:34:59But your position within that window is almost exclusively on you. Now that window also determines your ability to deploy your efforts, right? But that just moves the window. That doesn't move you within the window. Yeah. Well, James Clear has this nice line in atomic habits about how certain people become so preoccupied with their genetic limitations that they never tried to actually reach them. I love that. Yeah, it's incredible, right? I think people understand this, at least in the context of physical fitness, right? It's like, well, I'm never going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I'm just not going to go to the gym, which is a completely misguided way to think about things.

1:35:33But yeah, I like that line about behavioral genetics, but then also there is individual agency involved, and you do have some control over this. I mean, I just wrote this post about Machiavelli and how in the discourse is on Livy, he writes about how, you know, he basically says God doesn't want to do everything. He's like, some of it is up to you. You know, this, he was in a much more religious time than we are, living in Italy and Catholic Florence, and God doesn't want to do everything. But then he says, you know, basically 50 % of your outcomes are due to fortune, 50 % of your outcomes are due to your own individual efforts, and fortune will favor you if you take action, these kinds of things.

1:36:14There's a political philosophy for Harvey Mansfield who actually suggested that this transition indicates that Machiavelli may have been an atheist. Because at first he starts out saying, God doesn't want to do everything, and then he starts saying 50 % is fortune and 50 % is you. Well, where does that leave room for God? And Machiavelli may have been sort of subtly indicating to the reader that, you know, you can talk about God, you can think about God, but ultimately it's gonna be luck and it's gonna be you, and that's all you have. to have got his percentages wrong. Yeah, exactly. So one of the things I looked at your end of your review that you did, and that actually reminded me that I hadn't done mine, is in the breakdown of what were the 10, but I think you did the 10 most red free articles and paid articles, which you'll still be open your website and people can go and check that out.

1:36:57And that prompted me while I was back home in the UK that fuck, I haven't done mine for Modern Wisdom. So thank you for that. But the best red article that you had last year was one called How I Read. Yeah, and does this great screenshot from Talab in the Talab says the opposite of reading is not not reading But reading something like the New Yorker. I was about that line so what do you think he means by that? You know tell them is so that you know screenshot from Twitter I think there's you know There is the sort of Twitter to lab and then there's the author to there's different You know there's different versions of him But I the way that I interpreted that you know the contender is tweet from to lab was that If reading is defined as consuming useful, important, timeless information, then reading the sort of hot takes in legacy media institutions, often colored by bias, colored by the ideologies of our time, that's actually the opposite of getting useful, important, timeless information.

1:38:03and you're getting sort of unuseful, unimportant, timely, you know, relevant maybe in the moment and then tomorrow people will forget all about it. And so I think that's kind of what he meant here. Daniel, to be fair, like I wrote in there that I do enjoy reading The New Yorker Sometimes, but not as much as I enjoy that tweet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's your advice for people who want to become better readers? I mean, it's a habit, you know, I've been sort of, you know, I'm touching on this idea of discipline, of habit of agency, and I think it's similar to a gym routine, where when you're starting out, it's difficult, it's building it into your schedule.

1:38:42But then once you get going, it becomes much easier to just sort of set it in, forget it. From these hours, from this time of day, I'm going to the gym and here's the workout and here's the routine. And now you don't have to think about it anymore. that sort of discipline equals freedom idea. And so I did that with reading. I've really been kind of on and off reader since I was a kid. I taught myself how to read in the foster homes, and then reading became this kind of, like the soothing experience for me that I could sort of disconnect from the world and learn about information and... To say for you.

1:39:18Yeah, exactly. And so I would do that. And so it's always been a sort of a companion for me. But with, you know, everyone gets busy, everyone has a million things that they have to do, they have work, they have obligations. But for reading yet, it really does, you really have to treat it like a gym routine or like a job or something like an important habit, set time aside every day. And so this is what I was doing in grad school was first thing in the morning, I'd have my cup of coffee and I try to read whatever, five pages, 10 pages, 15 pages, whatever it is. If people don't really have the reading habit at all, I do like James Clears idea of like start from like the lowest unit of effort possible.

1:39:55Like sentence. Yeah, sentence. Yeah, I mean, it would be really weird if you started from the word level, but yeah, sentence level or a paragraph level. You know, ideally you could get a page in, you know, something substantive and then build your way from there, whether it's a chapter, whether it's a book and so on. And I think yeah, breaking it down in that way is helpful because, you know, I speak to some people who want to read and they're like, okay, I'm gonna try to finish this book week. I'm going to try to finish this book this month. And I think like thinking in those terms isn't really helpful.

1:40:20I think you have to break it down further of instead of a book a month, I'm going to read three pages a day or 10 pages a day. And then you'll finish the book when it gets finished. The other thing is if a book is uninteresting to you or it's not holding your attention to just let it go, you know, it's fine. You don't have to read it just because you bought it or because you rented it from the library or would have you. It's everybody else says that it's good or because you read on Twitter that it's really informative. You want to tell the people that you've read it, that they've read it as well.

1:40:50Yeah, you don't, I mean, that's one of the things that I learned, too, was a lot of people, a lot of the sort of chattering class people, they will not read the books that they claim to have read, but they'll read reviews. And so if you want to just like know about a book to participate in a conversation, just go read three or four reviews online. And that'll sort of give you the highlights of what people are talking about, or what the takeaways are that people care about from the book. But if you really want to do a deep dive, if you really want to understand a book, then yeah, you have to read the whole thing, cover to cover.

1:41:18But take it slow, do what you're comfortable with. If you want to skip around, that's fine too, that if a particular chapter title sticks out at you, it seems to be especially provocative or interesting. Start with that chapter first, and then you can go back. I would recommend for most books, especially most older books, to actually read the preface, the authors know to the foreword because for a lot of sort of older texts, I mentioned Machiavelli earlier, it does help that those, the prologues and all those kinds of things, they will contextualize the book and explain to some degree, why is this book important?

1:41:55Why do people care about it? What's been the commentary summary of this author's influence throughout the centuries? And so I do recommend reading that and not just skipping the chapter one. And, yeah, I mean, there are other things too that you can read multiple books simultaneously. There's no rule in place. I think we learned from school that one book at a time, you know, read this and hear the formula for how you read. But actually, you can do whatever you want, skip around, read two pages of this book, put it down, you know, take a week off, read this other book for a while. I'll do that when I'm on vacation.

1:42:29I'll just start a new book. Even if I'm working on three other books back home, I'll just pick up a new book off the shelf and go on vacation And that'll be my vacation book. I do weird things like that and for me it it's helpful and And the other thing is it's helpful to take notes to Whether it's in the book itself people get mad at me sometimes on Twitter. They're like, oh, you're defacing that book Like oh, you're bored. It's my book exactly. Yeah, it's not like I'm vandalizing. You know, there's a there's a really good book called How to Read a Book, called By Mortimer Adler. And he was a professor at the University of Chicago in the mid -late 20th century, but he wrote this book basically explaining the different forms of reading, the different types of reading.

1:43:14And this is where I picked up a lot of this information about it, it's okay to skip around. What are your goals for reading? Break down the habit. But one of the points he's made is that no one mis, you know, he makes this analogy. He says, no one mistakes the, what did they call it in the composers of music like the sheet, the sheet music or something. No one confuses that for the melody itself, right? It's like no one's, you know, the paper is not sacred. The ideas on them are sacred. And most authors would be flattered if someone was so invested in the book and the topic that they're engaging their own fucking, yeah, in the marginalia.

1:43:50Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you see this with, like if you visit museums, Cambridge, they have like Darwin's notes or his scribblings of other people's texts. And you can see, like he was reading and he was making notes. And he was doing this in a time where it was actually harder to get books than it is now. And so engage with the book. Try to understand what the points are in the book. Don't just, I mean, this is something that I used to do. Even though I was a reader, I didn't really, I didn't really try to understand what the book was about before I started it. It was like, oh, here's an interesting title and I'd read the back of it and it would be, oh, it's about XYZ and I'll just start reading it and sort of fumble my way through rather than think about, okay, where's this author coming from, what point is he trying to make, why is this book important, try to take that sort of metal level perspective as well so that you can really understand where he's coming from and break down the points.

1:44:46things. If you really want to, especially for more modern social science books, one thing you can do is essentially just read the first and last chapter or the preface in the last chapter because that's just the way that's just a style of writing now where publishers want you to just basically summarize the idea at the beginning and the end for busy people, for tired people. What's this book about? What are you going to talk about? And then at the end say, here's what I talked about. And that'll sort of give you maybe 50%. What a funny hire. That's so funny. What about revisiting things? Because your recall seems to be quite impressive, which is something that people want.

1:45:25They want to, reading something and then not being able to recall what you read is kind of in some ways, like not having read it at all. Yeah, well, I think taking notes, highlighting, and then what I'll do is like, you know, I'll have like a Google doc or some kind of note -taking app where I'll like cut and paste if it's like a Kindle version or if it's the paper version, I'll sometimes I'll just post it on Twitter. And then that'll be like the search function where I can find it later. Or I can, yeah, I'll just... I'll just... I'll be completely deleted from Twitter. I know, that would be...

1:45:56It's not the access to the audience. It's my own archive of my notes. Exactly. That would be rough, yeah. And so, yeah, so I think sharing it in that way, and that's actually how my Twitter started, was me just sharing, no one's in things I was reading. That's like how the initial sort of growth occurred was, I was in, I think it was an undergrad when I started it in 2017, posting my notes online and my highlights and underlines. And so yeah, I think like pinpointing the interesting points, doing like a very brief summary, even it's literally one sentence, preferably a paragraph. If you finish a book, like what did you get from this book?

1:46:34What are two or three things that you remember right now having just finished read it? because if you have just finished reading a book, the most important or interesting or provocative points will be at the top of your mind. Just try to paraphrase it. Don't even go back to the book and say, well, what did he actually say? Try to say, what did I remember? Type it out, try to use that forced recall, and that'll help to sort of get it into long -term memory. And then every once in a while, like if I'm flying on a plane or if I'm waiting in line or something, usually I'll read a book, but sometimes I'll actually just revisit my notes and say, you know, what did that book say?

1:47:09Or what was that point? And do a control laugh if I just want to read about what a mating psychology or what have you. I'll just do the control laugh. And okay, hear my notes on mating psychology from David Bus or this book or that book. And that'll help me to sort of connect the dots and also help to provide material for my sub -stack. Which is most important, obviously. Rob, I appreciate the hell out of you. It's very good to speak to you again. I'm so happy that this book's finally out. It's taken forever. Yeah, it's been five years plus, yeah. in the making. Yeah, this has been going and then it's been ready to be published for a good while as well and you've been sort of held at the starting line.

1:47:44So, what should people go? Do you want to check out the book that's substacked the everything else? Yeah, they can get my book troubled, a memoir foster care family and social class that's you know, wherever books are sold. And yeah, follow me on Twitter, at RobKeyhenderson, substagrobkeyhenderson .com. Hell yeah. Thanks Rob. Thank you Chris.