Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rob Henderson. He's a PhD graduate from University of Cambridge, a US Air force veteran, and an author. The people who make the rules are not the ones impacted by the rules. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower class. And they're everywhere. Expect to learn Rob's opinion on the recent catastrophes in american higher education. Why luxury beliefs have become more common than ever before. What Rob learned during his journey through all class levels, what it's like to truly be in poverty. Rob's advice for how people can become better readers and much more Rob happens to be one of the smartest people on the Internet. I love his twitter. I love his substac. He's always deep in the research, finding cool stuff about social psychology or human nature or anthropology or evolution or whatever. And he's brilliant. And I will continue to bring him on the show until the sun engulfs the earth because I like him. And I hope that you do too. This episode is brought to you by WHOOP. I have worn WHOOP for over four years now, since way before they were a partner on the show, and it is the only wearable I have ever stuck with because it's the best.

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You.

What do you make of the last few months of fallout from Yale and Harvard and such?

I mean, yeah, we saw that big testimonial from the presidents. Yeah, it was Harvard, MIT, Penn. I mean, I wasn't surprised by it. I mean, a lot of people, I think, are finally fully realizing they're coming to their senses. People have been saying this for a while. You know, eventually the pendulum will swing back and people will finally figure out what's really going on in these institutions and this sort of ideology that's been spilling out of the universities. And now I think they finally are actually truly realizing it. But, yeah, I saw the kind of the birth of what a lot of people call wokeness in 2015. When I arrived on campus at Yale, and that was my first semester, I saw what was happening there. And, yeah, I mean, I think you can draw a straight line from some of those events in 2015 to what we're seeing now. And, yeah, it's been really ugly, but kind of amusing from my perspective because I'd like to think that I was one of the sort of early observers and people who could recognize what was occurring and then later on. So Jordan Peterson was another.

And there have been other critics of higher ed and especially these elite universities. But, yeah, it's been really amusing and also sort of disheartening to see it.

There's this sort of OD blend of fatalism, Scharden, Freud, nihilism, sort of pleasure displeasure, like, ick, pity. It's a real concatenation of things. And obviously we've got a couple of mutual friends that have either been directly or tangentially involved. Vincent, our mutual friend, I managed to get removed from a higher education institution because of him appearing on this podcast. Carol Hooven, who is a really good mutual friend, has kind of been thrust into the middle of this. She told me that she basically felt like she'd been used like a football. And for the people who know who Carol is, she went on Rogan. I think she cried like six times on Joe's show. She cried at least three times on mine. We went for breakfast. I'm pretty sure she cried like three times at breakfast. She's just a very sort of emotional person. She's really sort of feeling this. And, yeah, you realize in a sort of proxy fucking battle like this, the people that are useful political footballs to be kicked around often end up paying a pretty high price. And no one ever thinks about them because you're like, oh, no, but you're a flaming warrior for free speech or whatever.

And you go, well, yeah, but I didn't ask to.

Yeah, very few people want to be fired. I mean, a lot of people may not be familiar with just how difficult it is to get an academic job in the first know, I'm friends with Vincent. I saw. I mean, he was hustling hard and he had a very impressive academic record, and no one wants to be in that position. I think their critics or their detractors say, you know, oh, poor me with your cancel culture. And now look at you going on all these podcasts and playing up your victimhood and all of this. But that's not what it is. I think for some people, it's just a consolation that, well, I lost my dream job. At the very least, I can sort of communicate.

Salivating, fucking something.

Exactly. And, yeah, I was observing all of this from afar. I mean, one thing that I've pointed out before is that for every public academic cancelation you see, there are probably five to ten others that are not covered in the media. Most people actually don't enjoy the limelight that much, especially academics, who tend to be kind of weird nerds with their obscure niche interests. They just want to keep their head down, do their research, be left alone, and then suddenly they are accused of x, y or z, and they just want to silently have it blow over. And that's like the sort of modal case. That's the usual case. And so, yeah, we can see it now that finally people are recognizing that there's a serious issue. I didn't even want an academic job. I mean, by the time I was probably about halfway through my phd, I saw what was happening. I remember, yeah, I would have very contentious discussions with other PhD students and postdocs and kind of early career researchers, and I would tell them, like, I don't think that if you color outside the lines, if you are an independent thinker, it will be very difficult for you to get a sort of typical tenure track academic job now.

Not impossible, but just much harder than it would have been maybe ten or 15 years ago. And people say, oh, no, that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And now, four plus years later, I'm seeing, like, some of those friends are having difficulty. Some of them have been hired and fired by now. Wow. I've seen the whole spectrum of outcomes. Some of them have successfully obtained jobs and just keep their mouth shut. But for me, that wasn't what I thought academia was going to be like. I thought it was going to be this little kind of contained bubble, I guess some people call it the ivory tower, right? Where you can live that life of the mind and communicate interesting ideas and debate and disagree, but still sort of inch your way towards the truth, or at least inch your way towards interesting ideas, but that's interestingly happening more on places like podcasts and substac and alternate sort of parallel institutions.

Yeah, it's fascinating to think as well about, I guess, slot cancelation. So I had Ricky Schlott on who co authored the canceling of the American Mind with Greg Lukhianoff, and she was talking about all of the different ways that people kind of get soft canceled. And it's just not being invited to the end of your know, it's people sitting in different locations to you. I think she went to maybe NYU Stern, and she was hiding Jordan Peterson books under her. Know, like fucking Anne Frank in the attic. Philosophical Anne Frank. And she was saying it's, there's lots of sort of ideological shit tests, she called them, which I thought was a really great name. What do you think about Ben Shapiro? Just like fucking throw that hand grenade into the room and see if anyone pipes up or doesn't pipe up.

That was something that I learned when I was in grad school was, does anyone just remain silent and not say, oh, he's an evil right wing, whatever. Right. If they just kind of keep their head down and don't say anything? I observed that silence is compliance or whatever. Silence is violence.

What about the, you had this interesting idea about the hidden hierarchies of the Harvard extension school thing.

Yeah. Well, I saw that was, I was observing what was occurring on Slash X with Christopher Rufo, who was one of the sort of architects of pointing out and removing the Harvard professor after her comments about kind of condoning anti semitism on campus and then discovering her plagiarism and all after he was perceived to be successful. I mean, she was ousted, she was pressured to resign, and she did. All of these professors at elite universities and all of these university supporting members of the chattering class were saying, oh, Christopher Rufo got a degree from the Harvard Extension School. And are people aware that that's not the real Harvard? And do people understand that? It's not typically what we think of as a real graduate studies degree. It's not a real master's degree from Harvard. They just wanted people to be very aware that this sort of outsider, this pleb who got this degree from this extension school, he's not a real academic. He's not a real serious thinker. Yeah. He's written books. Yes, he works at a very prominent think tank. And yes, he's very successful in the real world, but he has his degree, which is sort of getting things backwards.

Right. You want the degree in order to signify that you're capable in the real world, but they have the, oh, this guy's capable in the real world, but now they're looking at the degree as if it's fraudulent and therefore this nullifies all of his.

That's indicative of his real value.

Exactly. Yeah. They're placing his value on the educational credential rather than on his effectiveness in his life and in his career. So I'm watching this and I'm thinking like, yeah, this is, I'm, I've seen know since entering college, since entering higher ed, this strange status anxiety, particularly among people who attend these kind of institutions. I mean, the people who were pointing this out about Rufo's degree were professors or graduates of whatever, Harvard or Oberlin or Stanford, whatever. Like these kinds of places, people that.

Knew the language, they understood what an extension school was.

Yes, exactly. And it's just amazing to me that Harvard even has this program in the first place because it relies on that duplicitous game of, if you're a member of the unwashed masses and you go to the Harvard Extension School website, it actually says, we are Harvard. You will have the Harvard degree. You can put. It even says something like, you'll be able to put Harvard on your resume. This is on the official website, while simultaneously communicating the coded message to everyone else at Harvard and everyone else in this sort of rarefied segment of society. Know, we have to do know, we have to put that on the website. But it's not really hard.

You're not on the main stage. You're kind of on the second stage in the festival. It's like the overflow room.

It shocks me that they're willing to take the reputational hit to operate a degree mill. I mean, to me, it's just very tawdry. It's almost like I have maybe this judgmental attitude about, like, this is very kind of vulgar that you guys would even do this in the first place, that you're playing this game. And, yeah, I thought it was very ugly the way that they were pointing this out about Rufo. And it also ended up backfiring, I think because they felt this faction of cultural elites and these legacy institutions felt threatened. They felt like they had received an l, and so they had to lash out and get back at him.

Well, it's the same as someone does something to you, a really cutting jibe, and you're like, shit shoes. It's the only thing that you're like, you're fucking just grabbling at something. I remember once there was this guy, it's so funny, there's this dude stood in the front door of a nightclub complaining about the fact that he couldn't get in. And he just kept on chirping and kept on chirping and kept on chirping. And I was feeling particularly pissy that day or whatever, so I said something back to him. And I've got like two or three, six foot four, Jordy gorillas either side of me that are working and I'm busy trying to organize clipboards or something else. And he couldn't think of anything to do. So I had a necklace on of some kind, like on the outside of a t shirt, and he sort of reached forward and grabbed that and that was the one thing. And then sort of scuttled off. And I was like, my 35 pound fashion net necklace isn't a big deal, but just that that's the one thing. And it's kind of the same as Christopher Rufo's, like, www.

Extension school. You're not part of the real chattering classes.

Yeah, it was very short sighted, and ultimately I think it was damaging to them.

Oh, anyone else that's got that degree or is thinking about going to that place is like, oh, well, they said that ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, Chris Rufo is like just one of the fucking peasants, the same as the rest of us.

Right?

So maybe I shouldn't think about, oh, that's interesting.

So you're saying that anyone who might want to apply for the Harvard extension school will see that, so they'll have fewer know the institution will ultimately be less profitable. I didn't even think about that.

Less prestigious.

I was thinking more on the reputation end of it rather than the sort of economic end. But yeah, this idea that people will observe, I thought it was an error for two reasons. One was that most people don't like snobs, right? So they see this and they just feel, like, icky about it, that they're even pointing this out in the first place, or that they think that they're somehow superior. They don't like that attitude. And then the second was that, to me, it kind of exposed the hollowness of the egalitarian dogma, the supposed egalitarian dogma of elite academia that, oh, we're all for equity and DEi or whatever it is, that we're so accepting and tolerant and welcoming. But by the know, your aristocratic title is fraudulent and you're a know. I was texting a friend earlier about this. He's actually a grad student at Harvard. And I was like, my impression of this was basically like, the attitude at elite universities is everyone is equal, but some people are less equal than others, right? It's sort of a spin on the animal farm idea. We're all equal.

But some people. You had that George Orwell quote. You said how in the road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell's explaining how upper class snobs, while theoretically pining for a classless society cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, the book is great. Orwell was so astute in his analysis of class, but that was just. Yeah, I mean, this has been going on for a hundred years now. And that was the first thing that came to mind when I was seeing this, that these supposedly open minded, tolerant, welcoming people were suddenly pointing out that he got a degree from the institution. Right. Like, it's your website.

You got over the bar that everybody asked for, but you kind of landed in an awkward place on the crash mat. Yeah, you're so right. And this is why, fundamentally, I think that people are so skeptical and critical of anyone who proselytizes about their morality or how ethical or how caring they are publicly. Because you go, what are you covering up for? I don't believe that you actually think that. And sure enough, when the gloves are off and you see someone in a little bit of pressure or receiving a little bit of heat, where do they go? Well, all of the inclusivity and egalitarianism and care for the beauty of academia overall, all of that's out the window.

Yeah. When the pressure is on, right. When people feel threatened, when they feel, in a sense of sort of emotional intensity, a lot of negative emotions, suddenly the mask slips and you can see.

What they really, toys are out of the pram. They're just as. And this is the concern that people had all along. It's like, oh, that's what we thought you were like. We thought that you were highfalutin, not actually caring, adrenochome drinking, long hooded nose, pentagram dancing like dickheads. And sure enough, your mask has slipped. You've got your brand new book out, which everyone can go and buy right now. They should go and buy at this very second. We haven't ever spoken about this because pretty much since I've known you, at some point, you've been working on your memoir, troubled luxury beliefs. That is a kind of example of luxury belief, although it's not patient zero. How do you explain to my audience that hasn't yet heard you talk about a topic that you've repopularized? How do you explain luxury beliefs?

Right. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core component of a luxury belief is that the believer is often sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. And we can get into specific examples. But, yeah, I like this one that we've been sort of touching on this snobbish attitude about higher ed and how. Yeah. So on the one hand, when people are pointing out that this school or that school is better than the other, you are sort of boosting your own status, right? Especially these people who are already graduates of or teaching at these institutions, they're bolstering their own status. And then by speaking in this way about the hierarchies and which school is actually above which other school, they are sort of inflicting costs on everyone else who would like to ascend the educational ladder, who would like to get a degree. But a lot of these people just don't interact much with people who are upwardly mobile or trying to be upwardly mobile, who are trying to go to university, trying to get a degree. The vast majority, and I talk about a lot of the statistics in my book about this, in the later chapters, about how more than 80% of Ivy League graduates have at least one parent who went to university.

I mean, they're sort of immersed in it from birth. They've never actually interacted with a person or had a 15 minutes conversation with someone who doesn't have a degree or on their way to getting a degree. And it's just not on their radar. And so in their world, everyone went to university, or everyone should go, or anyone who doesn't go to the same category of university that they went to, there's something wrong with them. And I noticed this a lot when I arrived on campus. And it's very subtle. I mean, at first, I was sort of, to some degree, I think I was duped because I fell for the, oh, everyone's equal, everyone's fine. Also, the other thing about these institutions now is that they don't look the same. Right. One of the ideas about, or one of the components of the luxury belief idea is that luxury beliefs have, to a large extent, replaced luxury goods. Which isn't to say that luxury goods don't still signify status, brand names, and all of those things still matter. But my claim is that luxury goods have become a noisier signal of status. You can't tell right away, necessarily anymore, when you just go about your life in public who's rich and who's poor just by how they look.

And so I build on these sort of sociological frameworks in my writing and in my book work from Thorsten Vablen at the turn of the 20th century. He wrote theory of the leisure class. He wrote about how the upper class, the aristocrats of his time, they demonstrated their status through tuxedos and evening gowns and pocket watches and monocles and expensive and intricate hobies and attending lavish events, hiring servants, those kinds of things. And then by the mid 20th century, there was a sociologist named Pierre Bordeaux, who wrote a book called distinction, a social critique of the judgment of taste. And one of his insights in that book was that rich people, affluent people, they'll convert their economic capital into cultural capital, and so they'll spend money in order to demonstrate their class or exhibit their membership into this rarefied strata of society. And so in his day, again in the mid 20th century, and he was mostly commenting on french culture, but people can sort of understand what he's getting at, where people would spend money to learn about the subtleties of wine or the intricacies of art or fashion. Yeah. Falconry or beagling or golf or these kinds of.

You have to have money. You can't be the kind of person who works a manual job or who.

See the same thing in almost the reverse in asian societies. At the moment. When I went to Thailand for the first time, all of the receptionists were wearing lighter makeup on their. I thought to myself, why? Because it's so silly. Because the face finishes on whatever the jawline here, and the blending between the face and the neck is difficult to do. And I thought, why? And I asked someone, why the fuck are they making their faces paler? And they said, oh, well, it's because the indigent laborers, the people that work out in the fields, are heavily tanned. So the higher class jobs are the ones that are inside. Which means that the paler you are, the more status is conferred on you by your profession. But then I also realized how stupid of me and how myopically western of me to do that. Coming from Newcastle upon Tyne, the Jersey shore of the UK, where girls turn themselves orange to signify, I have all of this leisure time, I'm able to go away and holiday to exotic places and lay by the beach and get sun on me.

I like. Yeah, yeah, that's very. If you. If you live in northern Europe or somewhere cold where there isn't a lot of sun, having a tan is the signifier of status. So, yeah, I think that's an important point here, that it does vary from culture to culture. I point this out, the research and everything in my writing about how status itself, the specific examples and manifestations, can be ephemeral. They can vary by time and place and culture and generation and so on. But the desire for status, the desire to exhibit it, to show other people how prestigious or how dominant or how important you are that that remains. And so my claim is that luxury beliefs, I mean, they're mostly confined to that sort of highly educated people who attend elite universities, people who study there, people who are graduates of these places, who tend to operate legacy institutions, who run media and academia and who generate knowledge, people who work in sort of culturally influential organizations. And a lot of them hold these luxury beliefs. I think we saw this in 2000 and 22,021 with the defund the police movement. I mean, I coined the term luxury beliefs in 2019 and started to write about it and do the research to sort of support this idea and point everything out that sort of all of the sociological concepts undergirding it.

And then six months later, people started talking about defunding the police. I felt like I didn't even have to. Here's the reasoning behind luxury beliefs. To just defund the police. It's right there. You don't even have.

Whenever somebody brings up your work to me and talks about luxury beliefs, the patient zero example is defund the police.

Yeah. Because it's so intuitive, of course.

Can you explain why that encapsulates luxury beliefs, structurally or functionally so?

Well, yeah, the luxury beliefs idea. If you say defund the police, you are increasing your own status because you look like a caring person. You look open minded and interesting and highly educated. And it also signifies that you're the kind of person who went to certain kinds of schools, you consume certain kinds of media, you listen to certain kinds of podcasts and so on, and so it makes you look a certain way to your peers. But once the support for defund the police becomes implemented into policy, once police stations and police departments have reduced funding, once you cultivate an attitude, so it's not just the policy, but you're also cultivating the culture and the attitude around law enforcement that, oh, we don't need police. You sort of give permission to people to be suspicious of police or to be derogatory towards police. As a result, we saw that a lot of police officers started retiring in large numbers. There's reports in major us cities that they're having difficulty with recruitment. Because if you're a smart, capable young person who wants to make a difference in your community, why would you want that job? If you know that people are going to view you with suspicion or with some kind of.

That you're sort of malicious or evil cops, I mean, they get paid okay, but it's not like considering the potential danger they face in their job. Part of the reason why people would want to do it is because cops formerly used to be seen as respectable and admirable, and people conferred a lot of status onto that.

Well, think about the difference between when a policeman currently in the sort of current defunder police era that we're in, policeman turns up at a scene versus a firefighter or an ambulance, a e person. The other two emergency services are seen heralded as heroes. And the police, like, is it acab? Acab. All cops are bastards.

Forgot about that. Yeah. And so who wants that job? And so, gradually, and we saw this in the aftermath of the defund the police movement, that violent crime spiked all across the US, especially major cities. Homicide rates increased to levels not seen since the early 1990s. And so when all of this was unfolding, I tried to find some survey data to see who's actually. Because I don't know anyone in my personal life who thinks that we should defund the police. I mean, other than some people at Cambridge and other elite universities, but ordinary people who are outside of these institutions. I didn't know anyone who was supporting this movement. So I had a suspicion this was actually a legitimate luxury belief. I looked at survey data for it, found one in UGov in 2020, which found that they collected data from a representative sample of Americans and they broke down the data by income category. And it was the highest income Americans who were the most supportive of defunding the police, and it was the lowest income Americans who were the least supportive. And then when later the different findings were reported for major us cities, Minneapolis and Detroit, one in New York City, they found that white Democrats were far more supportive of defending the police than black and hispanic Democrats.

And so it was like the people who were supposedly so kind and so sympathetic towards the marginalized and the dispossessed and the poor and so on, they were supporting something that actually those groups didn't even want. And an increased number of them were being victimized as a result of it. In my book, I point out that if you compare the lowest income Americans to Americans who earn the median income, what is it? They're two to three times more likely to be victims of violent crimes. They're seven times more likely to be victims of assault. They're 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault. Like, essentially across the board. The lower your income, the more likely you are to be a target of crime.

Could do with the police.

Yes, exactly. It would be nice to have someone you could call if you're being burglarized or assaulted. And so, yeah, it was a complete sort of backfiring. And there hasn't really been any sort of accountability or any kind of acknowledgment of what happened in the aftermath of that movement.

Yeah, it's wild. And then obviously, the big elephant in the room here is that the people who are supporting it are the ones who are the most likely to live in a gated community, in an area or a neighborhood that has not called the police in a decade, since the last time that someone from the community that they're probably talking about trying to protect accidentally wandered through their gated community. So it's rules for thee, but not for me. And let me explain to you, poor, underclass peasant person, what is best for you from my vantage point out here in my very comfortable home.

Yes, that's one of the components of the luxury belief, is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of the belief. And 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 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 and 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, 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 its.

Oh, my God, you're so caring. I know. The cops are so wrong. Like, they're treating these poor black people so badly.

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 it reported in the media, when 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. And so often what happens is that in at least the imagination of this strat of 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, the research and understanding that 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 know the struggling school teacher who decides to break bad and start cooking meth and lashing out at the system. And that's just a much more interesting mean. 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 like the perfect kind of movie for 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 shoplift. And the whole thing is like, well, screw the system. I can't make money off my artwork, and I have to work in food catering. And this is just ridiculous. And so I'm going to start stealing and robbing people. And the movie is portraying this as, like, a perfectly reasonable course of action. Right. It's basically like Breaking Bad, but the young woman version, right?

Yeah. And, yeah, I just think that's part of what drives the luxury beliefs phenomenon.

Yeah, it's wild, man. And when you see that, you really can't unsee it. Mary Harrington had this about a lot of the advances that were proposed by the feminist movement in the were put forward by women for whom the impacts wouldn't affect them. So a perfect example is, I guess, the push toward independence and the derogation of chivalry by men, because 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, 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, and 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 chivalry 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 a relationship with a guy who never knew his father, whose mom 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 antisocial behavior and all of this stuff. And it's like, well, I know that for you, lady, that drives a Mercedesbenz, 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 nighttime. And 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, 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. But 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 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, 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, or 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 as me is because they don't have the same, or because my preferences aren't implemented in society or throughout. Yeah. What you said earlier about Mary Harrington's point is interesting. I saw this firsthand, that where I grew up, basically anyone who was remotely sort of academically inclined went off to some state university. Everyone who wasn't but still had some sort of restlessness or ambition, they joined the military, and then all the guys who were 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, what ends up happening often is like, women get impressed. They have children with multiple men or the men, they have multiple partners and don't interact with their kids. I now have friends that I graduated from high school with. Who are these guys? And, yeah, it looks very different. Right. The sort of liberation and the belief that women don't need a man or men shouldn't. Women can live the same kind of life as a man. And 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.

Figures.

But if you're just working a menial job and 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. This was someone I graduated from Yale with. We were somehow got on the topic of family and future and this kind of thing. And she was basically telling me that marriage is this outdated patriarchal institution and society should move beyond it. We should evolve, get past it. And so I asked her, well, how did you grow up? What was your family life situation when you were a child? And she said, I was raised by my mom and my dad, and I did have that kind of conventional family. And then I asked her what she planned to do later in her, because she was working at a technology firm, she was going to 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? And she said, oh, yeah, I do want a family. Someday I'll probably get married and have a husband and essentially get married and 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 seemed very duplicitous that this. Clearly marriage has positive benefits. I 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 where I grew up, it was basically zero. And so clearly marriage had some kind of effect here. And yet 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 used to actually be more angry when I was in my late teens, early twenty s. I mean, I think part of it was just getting older. I think just age. Things just kind of tend to burn out and dim over time anyway. And I think the other was just a lot of sort of self focused work, self improvement, trying to get past it and put it all into context and realize that on the one hand, people are sort of responsible for what they do in their lives. But on the other, to understand the genealogy of the ideas that led us to this point, that's been helpful, too, to understand that, yes, like day to 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. And so when I start to dig at the root of this, of who is responsible for some of these ideas, who promotes the luxury beliefs and so on, and entering into institutions where I can see can, 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 sirut Chavla on. She's a psychotherapist, pushing back very hard against what she calls Instagram therapy, which is identifying everybody as a 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.

Yeah, I think that's well put. 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 struggling to get by, trying to make money, trying to whatever, living paycheck to paycheck, and then later joining the military, and my plate was full later, 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. And that 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 my adoptive family, to talk to them about all of this. I mean, 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. But later I did realize that actually, relationships are important. I mean, I went through, I think, the first six years after I left home. I never visited. I never visited for the holidays. I never visited her for any kind of special occasions. I did visit on and off, really, whenever it suited my schedule. I was very selfish. But then later. Now I make an effort. Now I make an effort to do all of those things and realize that actually all of these things, relationships are more important than you think, especially when you're young. Right. There's value there, even if you think there isn't. Yeah.

There's a degree of romanticism about monk mode and lone rangering it. And I think my current theory on this is that monk mode is a great tool, but a bad master. 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, right. Which is an over reliance 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. And 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. It'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. But 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 were doing it.

In order to get. Yes. You sort of mistake the means for the end. The end goal. And 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. What are your actions attempting to accomplish? What's your overarching 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? 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 money becomes the thing. And it's like, well, what's the money for? What do you want to do with that money? When you build up your bank account? Is that the goal is just to have a big number on your balance, or 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? I kind of came to that realization when I was in my mid 20s, but it wasn't until in my later 20s, really probably right, not until I was about to start grad school.

I was like, 2028. 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, we'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. And 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 your background, the life that you went through to where you ended up. Air Force.

Yeah, air Force.

Air Force. US Air Force. GI Bill, Yale, Cambridge, PhD book. Going to be an amazing selling book. All the rest of the stuff. What do you attribute that trajectory to, given that you're friends with so many of the people that you grew up with that are still. They're the guy. They're that guy with three baby mamas and a bunch of alimony or whatever, and they're in the same town, in the same whatever. What was formative or what do you attribute the change in you to that the other people didn't?

There's a variety of factors, I think. One is you do need to have a certain amount of innate drive or ambition in the first place, and 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 a different direction. I think having sort of aptitude and drive and 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 lack opportunity. Or they've just been sort of beaten down by life so much that they don't even think to spot the opportunities that are around you and capitalize on them that was there. So I think some of the raw material was probably there. And then the other thing was just making this kind of halfway impulsive decision when I was 17 to just enlist and get out of my hometown. And I kind of knew that at this point. I'd had two jobs when I was in high school.

I was a dishwasher at a restaurant, and then I was a bad boy at a grocery store. And I kind of looked around at my coworkers who were a little older than me. These were guys, this kind of guy in their early to mid 20s, maybe some of them. 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 would ride a dirt bike and just smoke a lot of weed in the parking lot and just kind of aimless in adrift. And I thought, I think now, when you're 17 or 18, that's kind of cool to live that life, but when you're 24 or 28, that's kind of pathetic. And even when I was a teenager, I had that thought that sometimes my friends and I would ask these guys to get us beer, hook us up with weed or whatever. And some part of me, I was happy they were doing it. But on the other hand, I was like, why are you doing this for us, man? 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 a variety of factors led me to just enlist right away. I barely graduated high school. I 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. 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 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. And so my teachers were just 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 of days ago, I spoke with a mutual friend of ours, Paulina Pompliano, 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, there's a disconnect. I don't understand it. And I explained that I was in the air force for eight years. That's a long time. I was in from 17 to 25. And the book I kind of like gloss over because it's kind of mind numbing and boring, but it's like, make your bed, make sure your uniform is perfect.

Jordan Peterson boot camp.

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 cleaning and being meticulous about every little aspect of your existence. And I hated it. I hated every second of it. But 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.

What were 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 were the things where you're 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.

I mean, I think probably one of the bigger ones was learning the distinction between self discipline and motivation, because I really lacked both when I was a teenager. I didn't feel motivated to do well, but I had no external discipline around me, really. I mean, I had it in sort of fits and starts in different periods. It was just a very sort of chaotic early life. But I had no self discipline, certainly. Like, I couldn't impose on myself. 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, and 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 there's the distinction. The motivation is just a feeling. It's like, do I want to do this or not? And if I don't want to do it, I lack the motivation and I'm just not going to do it. Whereas self discipline is, I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel. And so for some people, it may make sense in the context of 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? What are your actions? What 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, 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, 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 martialed and you go to military prison. 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, Jocko has this phrase, discipline equals freedom. That once you sort of outsource all of your decisions to this sort of regimented system, then suddenly 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 now, like that.

You just set the system so that your money goes here, and this is what you're going to do, and you go to work at this time, and this is when you leave. And having that regimented system was really important for me. And now I do it. It's second nature to me. But it took eight years to get there. So, yeah, I think 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 think poverty. Poverty is an interesting question because I think a lot of people actually attempt to. They 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. And I think 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 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. 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. Like 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, I think the social environment is something people don't think about as well. That what family life and communities look like in poor and 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%. So 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 a sort of a glimpse into this, 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 a 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. And that's kind of like the normal situation when if you go to a high school in one of these areas and just start asking people about their parents or their families, they'll start describing about dad's in prison or mom's in drugs, or I'm staying with my aunt right now because my mom is in rehab or whatever.

Very chaotic.

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 very strong predictor of harmful or detrimental outcomes later in life. The 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. And so childhood instability is measured by things like, 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? Basically, 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 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 and 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 with multiple partners, versus a child who is raised by two very low income parents who are married, who are very focused on creating a stable and secure life for their kids. And you can kind of see this, I think, with like, 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, is like, yeah, there was a bit of that material impoverishment, but it was more just people, like, living in a very kind of ugly and almost like masochistic way of just careless and impulsive and sort of drug addled.

What'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, predictably down. What do you think is the mechanism there?

Probably some of it would be genetics, but I'm not sold that it's people.

That are quick to anger externalizing behavior as parents give the raw materials of externalizing behavior to kids.

Right, okay. I think that's one piece of it. But I think that Robert Plowman reigns supreme. Exactly. And I think, yeah, that would be the Robert Plowman answer. But I do think that that can't explain 100% of it. Because, for example, if you just look at white Americans, over time, all of the same things have occurred across social classes that actually 50, 60 years ago. 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, they grew up basically during the Great Depression, but they got married. My grandfather and my grand, they would tell me this story about how my grandfather asked my grandmother to marry him. And I think he was 18 or 19 and she was like 17. And they were just like the only two young people in this town. And she was like, I'll marry you, but you have to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop gambling. And he was like, done and done. They got married and they had a six.

Let's have sex.

Yes, exactly. I think they had four or five kids, and they were married for 60 plus years. No issues. I'm sure they had issues, but you know what I mean. And then they had four kids, all four kids divorced. And they did get married, but then they ended up getting divorced. Some of them had kids, step kids, that kind of thing. Now I'm a member of the next generation, and I'm seeing my cousins, and it's not even marriage. It's just like, oh, they hooked up and had a kid, but he hasn't spoken to his kid in three years. 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. People will point to economic factors, but my grandparents were very. They were probably poorer than. They're definitely poorer than my cousins now. They could not afford the things that my same aged 30 year old cousins could afford. So 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 and you speak about on your podcast around incentives, around sex and romance and dating and just.

Yeah, in the 19, what is it, the 1940s, 1950s, my grandparents generation, it was like if you wanted to have sex, you had to live ring on a baby life. Exactly. And that was just the reality then. And now it's completely different. And I've presented this thought experiment before. I think I posted this back when it was still called Twitter, which was if you traveled back to 1945, just got in a time machine and walked out in the post war era, and you said very soon, I think it was 1960 when the birth control pill was invented. You say, very soon, there's going to be this magical technology, the birth control pill, so contraceptives will be widely available. Abortion will be more accessible, certainly, than it is now. So you'll have all of these reproductive options before you. Do you think in the future there will be more children born out of wedlock or fewer? Do 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, 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 Edistat came on the show and Adam and Eve and the pill revisited her new version of her old book, Fantastic. Just so great. And it's true, man. We look back and it's kind of cool. In the red pill manosphere, even in the EP world, the social psychology world, for people 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.

Okay, so you're going to decrease shotgun weddings because the onus is going to go from the male that accidentally impregnated to the woman who quote unquote, chose. It went from a man's mistake to a woman's option, and you go, okay, right. And then what's going to happen to that? And what's going to happen to that? 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 looked 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 in sight. And yet in retrospect, you go, how could no one have seen this coming? Hindsight is a wonderful thing with regards to that. One question I've got that I think is kind of interesting is so squalor. Your word up until the age of 16. 1717. Up until the age of 17. That should set a pretty low hedonic threshold, right? That you're in a nice air conditioned 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 uber to get from here to the airport.

How have you found your ability to hedonically adapt over, 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?

That's an interesting question. I guess it's a bit of both. So day to day, I think. I don't really reflect in that way. You just sort of live your life. But when I reflect back and when I think about it and I realize there are those moments where, like, wow, I can do this thing that I couldn't have done even after I was in the military. I think the pay structure has probably changed a bit. But when I enlisted in 2007, to think I was making, like, one, $200 a month was the pay, and so I couldn't afford a belt. It was like small little things like that. Once I moved off base, I got this house with my friends. But you have to pay, like, first it's so funny. Now it doesn't matter to me because I have money. But back then, it was, like, panicking. I was like, you have to pay the first month and the last month's rent up front. And then it's like the security deposit, and then it's this, 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 until my next paycheck.

It's like that. It sucks. 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, where 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? And those two things are correlated, but they're not quite the same in some way.

I think parents often report much lower levels of happiness. But higher levels of life satisfaction.

Yes. And I think in that regard, it's like my happiness. I don't know if it's actually changed much. Maybe there is a bit of that hedonic adaptation where 15 years ago it was like, oh, I can go to Wendy's cool, like, I'm happy, whereas now it's 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, and I don't have to think about money as much anymore. And so, yeah, I think there is that. And also reminiscing, too, when I talk to my sister, or some of my old friends from high school and just sort of thinking about those days. It's like I do feel a bit better now about my life compared.

I was talking to a friend and they were asking me stuff about my childhood, and my memory is really patchy from my childhood. It's not fantastic, especially not sort of pre ten. And I said, look, what do you remember? They said, well, I remember a good bit because of my sister, because will prompt each other about, oh, do you remember that? Oh, my God. Yeah, we did do that thing and we were in that car, or we got stuck in the mud or whatever, right? And yeah, there's a degree 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 ten minutes and imagines what it would be like to live with no arms or legs. That's one of his favorite meditations among a bunch of other weird ones. So he's trying to dial up contrast as much as possible.

Interesting.

Think 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 wash my own back, if only I could brush my own 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. But the way that our sense of self works, what is it? Every seven years, every cell in your body has turned over, so there isn't even. You're like the three ship of theseuses, 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 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. But it's a permanent battle in some regards. From a poverty perspective. You were a guy who was born with no arms or legs and then grew them.

Yeah, I think that. Yeah, that's right. If I think about what it was like back then and I compare it to now, of course things are much better for me and yeah, it would be, I think, shameful to be anything other than completely grateful and just full of gratitude for proud as well.

I would like to think.

Yeah, I mean, that's a weird one. I think that's one of the things that in the book, I point this out, that when you don't really grow up with parents, because I grew up in foster homes before, I think there's like the developmental window where if you don't really receive positive feedback, I think I receive compliments in a very weird way where it's very hard for me to accept it.

It's a real skill, man.

Yeah.

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 it was, 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 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 doing something that's nice for somebody else is a nice thing to do. Gwinda, it was fucking Gwinda. It was on an episode that I did recently and I was like, dude, I fucking adore your writing. I adore your substack. You've got two books 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 a fugue state we drop into for 2 hours. It's brilliant. And I just saw his face. People can go watch the episode.

I want to watch it now.

It's very charming. It's very charming because obviously he holds himself to a high standard and stuff like that.

But you see this guy go like, yeah, thanks.

It's very charming.

Well, the other day I had this interaction with one of my friend's mothers. She was very high energy and she was like, oh, Rob, I love your writing. And it's like, I love your substack. And I watched you on modern wisdom. It's so great. And at first I was like, oh, that's nice. Thank you. Trying to change the subject, all these compliments, and I just feel uncomfortable. I'm like, that's really nice of you. Thank you so much. And then she's like, no, really. She's like, did you really get a PhD from Cambridge? Because that's amazing. And then I started to walk away feeling like, damn, I feel pretty good about myself, actually.

Can I have you hang around all?

Eventually I was like, I was suddenly getting this really positive mom energy. And I was like, this is great, actually. But it took a second, right? At first, I was like, 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 amount.

You're like, kind of the equivalent of a really obesely overweight person who can't just go in the gym and do a little bit. It's like, hey, we've got to shift 250 pounds. You need to stay on that treadmill for another hour. Mr. And then you finish and you're like, oh, wow.

Exactly.

There's like a crushing weight of compliments that you need, but that's something. Who wrote no more Mr. 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 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.

That is interesting. Yeah. I think from at least my impression is it's actually easier to deliver a compliment than way easier because you can be sincere about it. Like, you can honestly show your appreciation if you enjoy something to tell someone. But, yeah, this seems to be a common pattern that people have difficulty with receiving them. More so with guys maybe than girls.

Although even that's an interesting one because with women, for sure, 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. If a guy thinks that you've done something shit, they go, dude, that was 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 sincere versus insincere compliments from comparing men and women. That would be a fascinating study this morning.

I was prepping a newsletter. It'll go out tomorrow. I do like the three interesting findings.

Everyone needs to go to rob, substack, and subscribe. It's outstanding.

Thank you, man.

And I shamelessly repurpose at least one thing every couple of weeks.

I think, well, the findings deserved as wide an audience as possible, but this was an interesting one. It'll go out where? So this was a study from 1988. I'd be curious to see. 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, when women compliment women versus when men compliment men, what are they complimenting? For women, it was 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. So it was mostly appearance based for women, when they're complimenting one another, whereas 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 maybe, I wonder if it's kind of easier or more difficult depending on. So I would imagine 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.

If I go to you and I'm like, dude, you're looking buff. Yeah, exactly. Tell me about how good my last newsletter was.

Yeah. I wonder if we would feel more uncomfortable when it's something other than the typical 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. If there's an argument between a guy and a woman on the Internet, the woman's going to say he's got small dick energy, and the guy's going to call her a slag.

Right?

That's it. It's like, I'm going to derogate your chastity. I'm going to 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 going to say that you're, like, fatter, older, and uglier 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 Greta Tumburg accused Andrew Tate of having small dick energy. I think it's at the third most liked tweet of all time. Something like that. I think she's in the top ten twice, and I think Tate features in the top ten twice or three times. And at least maybe one or two of those are his interactions with Greta Tunberg. So kind of. I don't know. He's like the Michael Jackson to her. Janet Jackson or something. She's very, very successful when they get.

We're. I think that the same people who would probably endorse some form of gender blank slate egalitarianism or deny that there are any sort of biologically based sex differences will still sort of target those areas of insecurity.

The same as the Harvard extension school thing, right? 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 exactly fucking incel. Okay, well, if you throw that debate around. Speaking of that, Alexander Datesych 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. He put videos up asking participants to rank the attractiveness of different red pill influencers. Okay, so 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 to look at. It's on Twitter.

Him mining for the data is on Twitter. The results aren't. He only put it out yesterday. I think I got to look at this hilarious dude.

I have to. Is he on there?

I'm not and he's not. He went like, more kind of like another big names within that world or he is. Alex has an ability. I don't think I've ever seen you get into a spat on Twitter. I don't think you've ever had a back and forth despite having hundreds of thousands of people that follow you. Gwinda likes to kind of. He's more like a hitman. So he'll sit up on a ridge snipe and look out, and then he'll fire something and 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, and he's like, adjusts the site, fires, and then leaves. But I mean, Alexander goes in with incel co. That account that I think is the admin of the Incels co. Thing. He's back and forth with anyone, like egg anon accounts. 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. 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 on the show. Alexander Datesych. I think it's like at 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. It's nobody. And then sometimes it's a somebody.

But I think he's performing a much needed service because I don't have the patience for that. I think professors and researchers and podcasts, like just people who have a million things to do, but he's doing it very well and he's building an audience this way. And I think he's channeling his knowledge and his research toward productive ends. And I think someone should be engaging with a lot of these. Black pill.

It's fucking high price.

Yeah.

Do you see that? We got lumped into. We got given a name.

We did.

Me, you, William Costello, and Alexander Datesych. And it's the academic manosphere.

Okay, good company.

I like it. I think that's a pretty good.

Was in there.

Yeah, I think so. I think you were. It was a long time ago when this thing, it was like maybe months ago and I forgot to send it to you, but yeah, the academic manosphere types, it was used as a slur, but I was like, yo, if you want this to be a slur, make it less cool of a name.

Fucking dope.

I want to be a part of the academic manosphere.

Yeah, I got lumped in a couple of years ago with. It was some, like someone was trying to create like a league of the IDW. This 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 there were heavy Hitters. Eric Weinstein, you'll have a third string key. Back then. I don't know what, I had like 10,000 followers or something. And 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. I think you and I had just met, and it was still kind of early days. And I was looking at this, I'm like, I don't want to. 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 thing. I thought it was kind of.

So talking about you moving into the 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 were 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. You'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.

Oh, I see. Yeah. I arrived on campus 2015 as a mature student.

But asian, so looking like a normal aged student.

I think I had the beard back then, so I had like a full beard. So this is like a very common thing with vets because you have to shave every day and they inspect you to make sure it's like, it better be like this morning you shaved. Not last night, kind of thing. As soon as I got. I'm like, fuck. Not shaving for six months, I didn't work out. I think I gained like 20 pounds. The first semester was bad where I was like, I don't have to work out anymore. Yeah, it was really nice. And then I looked in the mirror, like, six months in, I was like.

I got to think, this is horrible.

But the first six months, it was glorious. But, yeah, I looked older. I was older. And the students, some of them would crack jokes about 21 Jump street, like that kind of thing. I think the first couple of months or so, nothing really unusual. But then I saw this very know 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. The Yale administration released this email basically telling the students to 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 in her residential college saying, like, do we really need the administration interfering in our lives? You're all adults. I trust that if you wear things that maybe other people don't like, you girls 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 and later for her husband, Nicholas Christakis, to be fired, saying that she was racist, she was defending cultural appropriation.

These students claimed they didn'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 caused us pain, suffering. We're under immense harm. This is, like, emblematic of broader, systemic forces that are working against. And I'm looking at these students, and I know for a fact a lot of them were the sons and daughters of millionaires. I remember asking one young female student, basically, can you explain why is this offensive? I don't understand. And she basically told me I was too privileged to understand why Erica Christakis's email was, you know, she was like some white girl who went to private boarding school and grew up in a rich neighborhood, but she was an activist and whatever. So she was like, kind of, is it the Titiana McGrath, like that archetype, except went to Yale and everything. And that was like an interesting thing, too, was like, 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 ills of the world and how to fix them and so on.

But then the students also placed a great deal of importance on lived experience. And if you live through something in your life, then therefore you're able to speak about certain things. You're an 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?

Isn't it 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, exactly. 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. I 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 they call it the Yale bubble, where the students would only stick around in this very sort of enclosed area. But I lived off campus in an apartment downtown. And so I would walk through a lot of poverty, a lot of squalor, a lot of addiction, and having 20 minutes earlier heard some student talk about how they were oppressed, and then I'd see real poverty and real suffering. And it was just very difficult for me to sort of reconcile those things. And eventually, at first, I tried to be sympathetic and tried to understand these grievances and the students and the graduates and the faculty and all these. And then eventually I was like, these people have. They just completely don't understand. They have no connection with it whatsoever.

And some of it, I think, is legitimately malicious and duplicitous. I would see, for example, people claim that investment banks were emblematic of capitalist oppression 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 that, to me, was like, that was a calculated move. And what I mean by that is.

Don'T want to work for them.

Yeah. If they can basically eliminate their rivals for these prestigious internships, then all the better for them. So I think some of it was tactical and calculated, but I think for a lot of people, it's just their hearts are in the right place or they're not really thinking that much about it. And so, yeah, it was very strange. 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 andme and got the results and found that my father was Mexican. And I went through, I called up our mutual friend Razib Khan. I was like, hey, can you look at this with me and help explain? He's like, yeah, your dad was like, Mexican. He was, like, indigenous from North America with some spanish ancestries. That's like a perfume he's like, you grew up in LA, Matt. What did you expect? And I was like, okay, so my dad was Mexican. 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 wasn't an activist.

He wasn't, like, woke or whatever, but I took a sombrero off the wall and put it on my head. And he was joking around, but he said something like, hey, that's cultural appropriation. You can't wear that sombrero. I was like, oh, my bad. And then once I got these results back, I was like, wait a minute. I'm allowed to wear that? I'm allowed to wear sombrero?

Get me a poncho. Get me some fajitas.

But the next thought I had was like, this just shows 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. And now what am I supposed to think now that I have these DNA test results? And then just, like, the whole idea of breaking people down into these ethnic categories and they are or are not allowed to partake in this activity or that or the other, 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 our attention and our resources and our time are spent on such frivolous nonsense. What is it that.

The tyranny of small differences. What's that thing?

Yeah. The narcissism of small difference.

Of small differences. That's it. Yeah. The smaller the differences between people, the bigger that they're blown up to be. When you have this relatively homogeneous group of people at Yale, it's all to do with. You can't speak to her like that. It's like, why? She's exactly the same as you. Just that one grandmother's half african american or something.

Yeah. And everyone is from probably the top decile 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. Yeah. This is an interesting point. The narcissism of small differences, where a lot of the anger I felt was, it was like, between someone at the nintieth percentile income who they were angry at that 99th percentile. Right? Like, 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. Or 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 mean, 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, bona fides.

Yeah, exactly. Who are really just kind of like lower middle class blue collar, but not like. I mean, the thing is, the way that the system works is, I think we might have talked about this last time about just how few people, less than 3% of foster kids graduate from university. Less than 3%. And 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 ods are so stacked against you. Even the people I knew who, I think I was one of, like, eight veterans on campus. 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. So I was one of eight military vets on campus. But even when I would interact with the other vets, enlisted vets in my cohort, so there were eight in my cohort, and I would speak with them.

It's like, oh, basically all of them were raised by two parents and had a mom and a dad who did prioritize education and who kind of set good examples and all of those things. And I think the left focuses 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. I think 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, customs, sort of good behaviors. I wrote this post, nobody is 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, selective university. But I think if they had been maybe taught different values and inculcated different habits, that two of them wouldn't have gone to prison.

One of them was shot to death. Friends working sort of menial, low income jobs. I mean, that's the sort of typical outcome of people in that community. And I don't think maybe we can't necessarily raise the ceiling for some people. We can definitely raise the floor, I think.

Yeah. So 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.

Boo.

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, its life circumstances, its nutrition, its upbringing. It's fucking unconscious trauma. It's all the epigenetics. It's all of that stuff. But 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.

Yeah, well, yeah. James clear has this nice line in atomic habits about how certain people become so preoccupied with their genetic limitations that they never try to actually reach them. I love that quote. Yeah, it's incredible, right? And 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 like a completely misguided way to think about things. But, yeah, I like this, that line about sort of behavioral genetics. But then also there is individual agency involved, and you do have some control over. Even. I just wrote this post about Machiavelli and how in the discourses on Livy, he writes about, know, he basically says, God doesn't want to do everything. He's like, some of it is up to you. So 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, 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. There's a political philosopher, 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 can talk about God, you can think about God, but ultimately it's going to be luck and it's going to be you. And that's all you heard.

Could have got his percentages wrong.

Yeah, exactly.

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, as in the breakdown of what were the ten? I think you did the ten most read free articles and paid articles, which will still be up on your website and people can go and check that out. And 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 read article that you had last year was one called how I read. And there's this great screenshot from Taleb in there. Taleb says the opposite of reading is not not reading, but reading something like the New Yorker.

I love that line so much.

What do you think he means by.

Know? There's a screenshot from Twitter, I think there is the sort of Twitter Taleb, and then there's the author, there's different versions of him. But the way that I interpreted that, the cantankerous tweet from Taleb, 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 that's actually the opposite of getting useful, important, timeless information. You're getting sort of unusual, unimportant, timely, 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. And to be fair, I wrote in there that I do enjoy reading the New Yorker sometimes, but not as much as I enjoy that tweet.

Yeah. What's your advice for people who want to become better readers?

I mean, it's a habit. I've been sort of, sort of touching on this idea of discipline, of habit, of agency. And I think it's similar to a gym routine, right. Where when you're starting out, it's difficult. It's sort of building it into your schedule. But then once you get going, it becomes much easier to just sort of set it and forget it. That 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 an 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. Yeah, exactly. And so I would do that. And so it's always been sort of a companion for me. But everyone gets busy. Everyone has a million things that they have to do. They have work, they have obligations.

But for reading, yeah, 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, ten pages, pages, whatever it is, if people don't really have the reading habit at all. I do like James Clear's idea of start from the lowest unit of effort possible.

Like sentence.

Yeah, sentence. It would be really weird if you started from the word level, but, yeah, sentence level or a paragraph level. Ideally, you could get a page in 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 I speak to some people who want to read, and they're like, okay, I'm going to try to finish this book this week, or I'm going to try to finish this book this month. And I think thinking in those terms isn't really helpful. I 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 ten 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, it's fine. You don't have to read it just because you bought it or because you rented it from the library or what.

Have you, because everybody else says that it's good, or because you read on Twitter that it's really informative, or that you want to tell other people that you've read it, that they've read it.

As of the, that was one of the things that I learned, too, was 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 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. But 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 or seems 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 author's note, the foreword, because for a lot of sort of older texts, I mentioned Machiavelli earlier. It does help that the prologs and all those kinds of things, they will sort of contextualize the book and sort of explain to some degree, why is this book important?

Why do people care about it? What's been the sort of commentary, a summary of this author's influence throughout the centuries? And so I do recommend reading that and not just skipping to 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. 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, take a week off, read this other book for a while. I'll do that when I'm on vacation. I'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's helpful. And the other thing is, it's helpful to take notes, too, 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, fucking bought it.

My book.

Exactly. Yeah. It's not like I'm vandalizing. There's a really good book called how to read, a book called Mortimer Adler 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, like, explaining the different forms of reading, the different types of reading. And this is where I picked up a lot of this information about. 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 he makes this analogy. He says, no one mistakes the. What are they called in the composers of music, like the sheet music or something. No one confuses that for the melody itself. Right. 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 reading their own fucking.

Yeah. And the. It's. 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 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, okay, 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 meta level perspective as well so that you can really understand where he's coming from and break down the points 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 style of reading or 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 hack. That's so funny. What about revisiting things? Because your recall seems to be quite impressive, which is something that people 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 I'll have a Google Doc or some kind of taking app where I'll cut and paste if it's like Kindle version or if it's the paper version, 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 get deleted from Twitter. It's not the access to the audience, it's my own archive of my notes.

Exactly.

Damn it.

That would be. So I think sharing it in that way, and that's actually how my Twitter started, was me just sharing notes and things I was reading. That's like how the initial sort of growth occurred was, I think it was an undergrad when I started it in 2017, posting my notes online and my highlights and underlines, I think, pinpointing the interesting points, doing 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? What 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, what did that book say?

Or what was that point? And do, like, a control f. If I just want to read about mating psychology or what have you, I'll just do the control f. And, okay, here are my notes on mating psychology from David Bus or this book or that book. And that'll help me to just sort of connect the dots and also help to provide material for my substac, 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 in the making. Yeah.

That 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. So where should people go? They want to check out the book, the substac, the everything else.

Yeah, they can get my book, troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class. That's wherever books are sold. And, yeah. Follow me on Twitter at rob khenderson substackrobahenderson.com.

Hell, yeah. Thanks, Rob.

Thank you, Chris.