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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
1:41
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another edition of Infinite Loops.
1:46
I am super excited today because my new colleague, Vatsal Kaushik, is joining me as a co-host. Welcome Vatsal.
1:54
Vatsal Kaushik: Thank you, Jim. Super excited.
1:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I'm also really excited about my guest, Rob Henderson.
1:59
I've been reading him for quite some time.
2:04
I think your stuff is amazing, Rob, and we're going to go through, I hope all of it.
2:04
But if you wouldn't mind a little background because your background is pretty unique in that you're kind of a bit of an Oliver Twist story.
2:19
Would you mind giving us some background, and welcome. Rob Henderson: Yeah. Thanks Jim. It's great to be here. And yeah, hey Vatsal.
2:24
At the moment, I'm currently a PhD student here at Cambridge England.
2:28
And before this, I was studying at Yale University where I got my Bachelor's in Psychology, but before I found myself in these universities, my life was a lot different.
2:33
So to just back way up, I was born into poverty to a drug addicted mother.
2:40
My mother was an immigrant from South Korea and shortly after I was born, my mother, her addiction became overwhelming.
2:46
She succumbed to this and I was subsequently placed in a foster care where I spent a few years in the Los Angeles county foster care system.
2:58
I lived in seven different homes throughout my childhood.
3:03
And I was subsequently adopted into this working class family in a small rural town in Northern California called Red Bluff.
3:09
But after a couple of years, my adoptive parents got divorced and there was this ensuing custody dispute.
3:14
I ended up living with my adoptive mother.
3:21
My adoptive father, who I had grown pretty close to over those couple of years, he severed ties with me because he was upset with my adoptive mother for leaving him, which I took pretty hard because out of all the foster homes, I was mostly taken care of by women.
3:35
And so he was the first father figure that I had.
3:35
And so to lose him was pretty devastating for me.
3:40
So I lived with my adoptive mother.
3:40
She was basically a single mom. We lived in a duplex.
3:43
My mother, a little bit later, fell in love with a woman named Shelly.
3:49
And they formed this stable family environment for me for a few years into my adolescence.
3:49
And that was sort of this bright period of my early life.
3:57
But then the summer before I was set to start high school, Shelly was shot.
4:01
And so this was basically like last try in terms of my ability to care about my future or really care about myself.
4:06
I got into a lot of trouble during high school. My grades plummeted.
4:12
I wasn't making the best choices and somehow miraculously, I ended up getting out of there.
4:18
I enlisted in the military, joined the air force and left when I was 17.
4:23
And that proved to be a good environment for me, provided the stability that I needed.
4:27
And after a few years of maturing and growing and learning throughout that time, that's when I started thinking about my future and going to college and so I entered as they say, a mature student.
4:37
So that's the story in a nutshell, and I'm happy to go into any of that further if you want, but that's the snapshot version.
4:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, I mean, fascinating.
4:43
You could write a book about it and I'm sure a ton of people- Rob Henderson: I am.
4:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, well, good. Great.
4:44
I will have you on again.
4:44
Because if we're just looking at probabilities here, you would have really beaten them given all of that in your past.
4:49
What do you attribute that to?
4:49
Was it some sort of satori, was it the military? What do you think? Rob Henderson: Yeah.
4:58
Well, in terms of the statistics, you're absolutely right.
4:58
I've actually looked into this.
5:02
I've done some research and found that for foster kids in the US, only three per cent of them end up graduating from college, which is a comparison, the average in the US is around 30 to 35% of American adults graduate from college.
5:11
So sort of one 10th as likely.
5:11
And for the bottom quintile, in terms of socioeconomic status or the poorest kids in America, about 10% of them graduated from college.
5:24
So if you're poor, you're actually more than three times more likely to graduate from college than if you spend any time in foster care as a kid. So pretty dismal.
5:28
As far as what helped me, or what made the difference, I think it was a lot of small things.
5:34
Definitely the military was probably the biggest factor by far.
5:39
I've talked to other people about this too, other guys who had served and how the military changed their lives.
5:44
And a lot of people point to things like the discipline, the comradery, having good mentors.
5:52
And I think all of those things are important.
5:52
But even just sort of more prosaically, I think a big factor here for, especially for young troublemaking kind of guys like I was, just having that structure and predictability was important.
6:04
Just knowing that for every action there will be a consequence and if you do something, the discipline is inevitable, there's no getting away with anything really.
6:13
And you can maybe get away a little bit, but eventually you're going to get caught.
6:16
And so you really can't get into that much mischief in the military.
6:19
Every aspect of your life is tightly regulated from your uniform, the way you make your bed, what time you're supposed to be ...
6:24
you can literally be thrown in jail if you don't show up to work on time. And everyone knows this.
6:26
It's very clear up front like, this will happen if you don't do this.
6:30
And so just knowing that was great for me.
6:34
It was a very on steer, almost like prison-like environment.
6:34
And for someone like me, it was good actually.
6:38
I don't necessarily recommend that for everyone, but for someone like me who really didn't have much discipline and much oversight throughout my youth, having that and just being in that environment is good.
6:49
And I also think that even if you don't learn anything, there's still like, because I study psychology, I study a lot of the sort of brain development and neuroscience, I think that the period for a young man from basically the onset of puberty to the early twenties are the most dangerous period.
7:02
You're the most dangerous person to other people and to yourself.
7:02
And to be in an environment where you can't really get into that much trouble for those years, even if you don't learn anything, it's basically pressing fast forward on those years from like, you enlist when you're 17 or 18, and then you get out when you're 22 or 24.
7:15
When you get out at that age, you're less impulsive, you're more mature, you're less likely to get into trouble.
7:20
And so even if you don't learn anything, just being in that environment, I think is beneficial for a lot of young guys. And I saw it for myself.
7:27
I saw it for a lot of other people as well.
7:31
And the other thing is just getting out of the chaos of my early life.
7:31
I talked a little bit about it, but just having the ability to step back from the disorder and the constant drama of what was going on around me, to just be able to take a breather and to live in an environment that wasn't so uncertain and so precarious, was also advantageous as well.
7:50
Just all of that predictability, knowing that on the first and 15th, I'm going to get a paycheck.
7:54
Knowing that if I have a problem, I can go to this person.
7:54
And to know what my life is going to look like on Monday and Saturday and so on.
7:58
All of these things that I think a lot of people just overlook or don't think much about, when you're someone who lived in a lot of dysfunction and deprivation, those things are hugely important. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
8:12
I think I agree with you.
8:12
I know all the stats, I study this stuff too, as I think you know.
8:16
And one of the things that I was thinking about when I was reading your stuff over again was, do you think there could be some process, ex-military, for example, so we can't put everyone in the military, but do you think that there could be some kind of process that would actually work, that we could actually put into place to mitigate these horrible and dismal statistics?
8:44
Rob Henderson: Yeah, I've thought about this.
8:46
If there were questions about whether there could be some kind of national service, some compulsory conscription, something like that, I think it could potentially work at least, I would like to see a test, I guess, on a small scale first, any kind of national service thing, maybe starting out with certain states as an experimental trial.
8:58
But in turn talking about statistics, I've seen, I keep track of some of this in terms of who enlists the outcomes and qualifications and so on, something like, if I'm not mistaken, seven out of 10 young Americans are not eligible to enlist for a variety of reasons.
9:14
The number one is obesity but there are other factors too like drug use, tattoos, piercings.
9:18
Now you can have, I think you can have, at least when I joined, this was back in late 2007 so the rules might be different now, but you could have tattoos, but it couldn't cover more than 25% of a body part.
9:26
But if you have sleeves and face tattoos and neck tattoos, they're not going to let you enlist.
9:31
Oh yeah, and criminal background was another.
9:35
And so a lot of young people even if they wanted to enlist or wanting to join some kind of national service, I think some of the rules would have to be changed or updated rearranged or something.
9:42
I personally, speaking of it, I don't have any tattoos and the reason for this, it's funny.
9:45
I remember I talked to one of my older foster brothers and I told them I wanted to get a tattoo.
9:48
He had some and some of my other older foster brothers did too.
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And they said, "If you get a tattoo, it makes it easier for the police to catch you. The cops can catch you."
9:55
And I said, "Well, what do you mean?"
9:59
And they said, "Well, if you have a tattoo and someone sees you, there's a witness, they can describe you by the tattoo and it makes it easier for the cops to find you."
10:06
And I heard that and I was like, "Oh, I'm never going to get a tattoo then."
10:10
And so that little piece of advice as a little kid maybe helped me later on for military enlisting.
10:14
That was one less thing I had to worry about. Vatsal Kaushik: Yeah.
10:16
So Rob, you've brought this up in a few of your essays that we're seen the shift where a lot more weight is being given to someone's credentials and position in the pecking order, while other more traditional virtues like a stable family have taken a back seat.
10:32
And while by you've written this probably from the perspective of the United States, I am seeing this in India as well, especially in upper middle class and upper class families.
10:41
My question is, is this trend dangerous?
10:41
What could be the long-term consequences of this trend?
10:45
Rob Henderson: I'm not sure.
10:45
Personally I'm concerned about it, it's the fact that I think that the metrics that we look at are often misguided.
10:51
So just kind of speaking from the US perspective and what I've seen and what I've read and experienced that so much of the discussion for young children, for example, and kids who grew up in poverty or in some kind of disorder and stability, it's about how do we get more of them into college?
11:06
How do we get them good paying jobs?
11:06
A lot of the discussion is centered on economics, which I think it's important and I've stressed this, this is not unimportant, but if that's where all of our focus is, we're overlooking other factors.
11:15
We focus a lot on education and economics, and I think we overlook social and emotional factors for young children.
11:24
There was a paper, I think it was either this year or last year, the lead author was James Heckman, the Nobel Laureate.
11:28
And he compared children's outcomes in Denmark and the US.
11:28
And what he found was that the disparities between the most educated and least educated families, the parents, the outcomes for the children were roughly the same.
11:40
Even though in Denmark public assistance is widely available in college is free, the outcomes for the bottom socioeconomic quintile for the children there are roughly the same as in the US.
11:51
And he stressed family factors, interactions with parents and children having stability and secure homes and so on.
11:56
And it wasn't discussed in the paper, but one thing that came to mind when I was reading that was, just because there are opportunities available to a young kid doesn't mean they're going to leap at them.
12:07
I remember when I was a kid, I was being shuffled around homes every few months and I didn't care about school, I didn't care about reading, I didn't care about learning.
12:14
I've either written about this or tweeted about, when I was six, I was doing so badly in school. I couldn't read.
12:20
There was a psychologist that came to one of my foster homes and she administered an IQ test and I got really low scores.
12:25
My verbal was, I don't know, in the eighties.
12:30
And this was because I just didn't care.
12:30
Like why would I read, why would I care about my future?
12:34
No one else seemed to, so why should I?
12:34
And so when we talk about all of this, I think that we're overlooking.
12:38
You need like a minimum baseline line of stability and a nurturing environment for kids before they can even consider taking those initial steps for their future for taking advantage of this opportunity.
12:46
So, in a way I think of families and stability and social, emotional factors, I think of that as that's like a secure base from which kids can then take that next step towards thinking about education and thinking about what kind of career they want to have.
13:00
Yeah, it was just not a big factor in my life until after I became an adult and was in a stable environment.
13:04
That's when I started to consider what I wanted to do in terms of my career, my profession, and those kinds of things.
13:08
First, I had to get into a position I had to get into the right mindset before I could consider them.
13:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you know what's interesting about that to me is, I've a junkie for this kind of research and the controversial author, Charles Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve looks at this a lot. He did a piece on this.
13:32
He excluded anyone but whites, so he didn't want to be called a racist and he was comparing- Rob Henderson: So he looked just at whites, right, is that right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah.
13:39
And he did that intentionally because his first book, The Bell Curve included different races and he was essentially canceled for 15 years for having the temerity to include that.
13:47
But he wanted to really get at the gist of what's a problem is, and his conclusions were the same as yours.
13:55
What had happened, and he looked at 1960 and I think the town that was working class was Fish kill or something like that. Rob Henderson: Fishtown.
14:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fishtown, right.
14:06
And then there was the rich town in 1960.
14:10
There was very little difference between marital rates, both parents at home, a father working, et cetera, very few births out of wedlock.
14:17
And this was true for the upper-class and for the working class.
14:23
Then he fast forwards and it's this huge explosion.
14:23
Upper-class; still two parents, still a stable family, nuclear family unit, lower-class; destruction, literally.
14:38
And one of the things that you've talked about that I find really interesting is, how much of this is due to the attitude ...
14:42
first off, I'm going to ask you, can you define an elite for me?
14:45
And then secondly, how much of this is due and I love this notion that you've come up with, to these sort of luxury beliefs that elites espouse because Veblen goods, anybody can get a Veblen good these days, so conspicuous consumption is gone.
15:00
And so I like your thinking about, okay, so now we've got to have these luxury beliefs, which by the way, I think are horrible, almost all of them.
15:12
But first off, what's an elite?
15:12
These days, how do you even define one? Rob Henderson: Yeah.
15:18
It's a thorny question, and I think there's a lot of disagreement about this too.
15:22
I tend to favor Paul Fussell's characterization.
15:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I loved him. Rob Henderson: Yeah.
15:28
In part, that was my first introduction to this whole idea of social class in America and how pervasive divot is and how it affects so many factors of our social lives that we don't really think about.
15:38
So for him, so if I get this ... let's see.
15:38
So for the lower classes, they tend to define the upper-class in terms of money, how much money you have.
15:40
If you have a lot of money, then you're considered in upper-class or in elite.
15:44
And the middle-class tends to include education.
15:49
So if you have money and you have the right educational credentials, then you're this member of this upper-class or this elite.
15:53
But the upper-class, they say those things aren't enough.
15:57
What really defines an elite is someone who has the right customs and mannerisms and tastes and habits.
16:02
You have to like the right things, you have to speak the right language, the right vocabulary, use the right words, the way that you dress, where you eat, what kind of foods you like, the music you listen to, all of those things.
16:10
I think for the typical person, it may not necessarily include all of those.
16:16
And I think even Charles Murray offers a couple of definitions of elite.
16:20
But generally, at least when I use the term, I tend to mean people who have gone to college and live comfortably and spend a lot of time on podcasts.
16:29
So these are the mannerisms that I include, they listen to podcasts, they spend a lot of time on Twitter, they're reading whatever's on the New York Times bestseller list.
16:37
So yeah, they're the kind of people who they know what you're supposed to like, they know the luxury beliefs that you're supposed to espouse, they read newsletters, what are some of these others, they have the right, like the media apps that update them on whatever the latest news is.
16:48
They're the kind of people who keep up with the front page of the New York Times.
16:51
I joke about this with a friend of mine.
16:51
So a friend of mine who was a former Marine, kind of similar background as me went to college and now he's doing pretty well for himself, but he makes jokes about how his coworkers, all of them have the Bloomberg app on phone and they very quickly scroll through it in the morning so that when they get to work, they can all sort of like, "Oh, did you hear about this, did you hear about this latest news," whatever, like so-and-so said this.
17:08
Especially back during when everyone is in the office, that's what he was alluding to.
17:13
But yeah, I think elite for me is something like that.
17:16
And of course, I think my definition has been largely influenced by my own experiences with them.
17:22
I've had contentious discussions with my friends who say like, "Just because someone went to Yale or went to Stanford, that doesn't make them an elite."
17:26
The real elites are the oil CEO's, those guys, they're the real elites or something like that. I don't know, I think.
17:31
This is such a blinkered view.
17:35
I've met people, so when I was an undergrad at Yale, I met people who their mother was a doctor and the father was a lawyer and they grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood, but they called themselves a middle-class because they don't have a private jet, something like that.
17:47
And they have no idea that the median American income is something like $48,000 a year.
17:54
The median income in Red Bluff where I grew up, when I was a kid with something like that, this is the median household income, it was something like $27,000 a year.
17:58
And so to hear people say like, "Oh yeah, my family, I think it's $500,000 a year but that's middle-class. We're scraping by."
18:06
That just completely blew my mind.
18:06
But I guess in a way I kind of get it because there's always this upward social comparison.
18:11
You're always comparing yourself to people who are above you.
18:14
You very rarely think about the people who aren't doing as well as you which I think is kind of a mistake. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah.
18:20
It's kind of like in group versus out group, it just seems to be part of our base human OS.
18:24
It's just like, people just can't help themselves to compare.
18:24
We had Luke Burgis who wrote a book on mimetic desire, something I've studied a lot because of how I think it really affects markets but it affects society as well, I think pretty clearly.
18:41
I'm glad though that I don't qualify as an elite because I have been recommending everyone not watch the news for the last decade because it's all propaganda, no matter which side you're on.
18:53
I love it because I'll say something like this and people will come back, " Yeah, you're right.
18:53
Fox is awful, but PBS is really good." And I'm like, "No.
18:57
They're just different levels of propaganda."
19:03
But let's move to your idea, which I think is really clever of luxury beliefs.
19:03
Can you give me some examples of luxury beliefs? Rob Henderson: Yeah. Yeah.
19:11
Well, I just wanted to say here that on this point of the media and social class, I didn't even really understand the importance of sort of keeping up with the media.
19:16
I had a couple of awkward interactions as an undergrad at Yale where people would say, "Did you hear about this piece of news?"
19:26
And I would say "No," because I didn't read it.
19:26
And then there would just be this sort of awkward silence.
19:30
And I didn't really think much about it, but this happened a couple of different times.
19:32
And it wasn't until later that I realized like, oh, you're supposed to know what's going on.
19:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
19:38
Rob Henderson: And there was a reason why, there were usually the copies, freely available copies on the campus of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.
19:43
And I think you get discounts for being a student and they try to indoctrinate you early, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
19:49
Rob Henderson: When you're 18-years-old, it's like, "You get a 50% discount for the subscription," and so on.
19:51
And I was just totally, totally out of it.
19:51
I mean, I remember growing up as a kid, we never really talked about politics.
19:54
I think my mom for a while subscribed to the local newspaper; it could be a factor of social media in terms of why media has become so pervasive and why we're talking so much about politics, for example.
20:03
But I remember as a kid, there was very little of it.
20:06
I think part of it is because when you're just sort of getting by, you're not thinking that much, you don't really have time to think that much about whatever the latest political topic is, keeping up with the latest trends.
20:19
You're just trying to pay your bills and you have ordered in, just regular things to worry about.
20:21
And now, as you sort of become more comfortable, you have more time to spend on politics and on the media, but for luxury beliefs.
20:25
So I define luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper-class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes, we've already touched on one example of this, which is this belief that the importance of family is not nearly as stressed when you actually look at the way that the upper-class lives their lives.
20:44
And, you'd alluded to this before, that in 1960, the number of children who were raised by both of their birth parents, in terms of upper-class and working-class families, it was virtually identical, it was is 95%.
20:53
It was very rare to see a kid who didn't live with their mom and their dad in 1960.
20:57
And then by 2005, for the upper-class, it had dipped somewhat from 95% to 85%, but still the vast majority.
21:01
And for the working class, it had gone from 95% to 30% by 2005, which is a massive drop-off.
21:08
I've read about this before, about how, of course, I've talked a little bit about my own situation, but my closest friends in high school, so I had three, there's a few of us, but my three closest friends, one of them was raised by a single mom who, at least, from what I remember, I mean, she had sort of a new boyfriend, a new person, he would call dad every six months or so.
21:28
It was just a new guy in his life, which wasn't good for him.
21:32
And another friend of mine, his dad went to prison and his mom was addicted to drugs.
21:38
She was sort of in and out of rehab, but he was raised by his grandmother and she passed away when we were in high school.
21:42
And so essentially, in the middle of high school, he was sort of like, roughly on his own.
21:46
And then my third friend, he was raised by his dad, but he had been raised by a bunch of different step-mom's.
21:51
So his dad was compulsively, marrying another woman every couple of years.
21:56
And so by the time he graduated high school, he had been divorced five times.
22:01
And so my friend would have different step-siblings living in the house all the time, and different step-mom, just a different family arrangement every, there would sort of be this great reshuffling, that'd be great reshuffle for red block, the red block version.
22:07
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Not the good kind.
22:07
Rob Henderson: Not the good kind.
22:08
Yeah, this is the sort of rural California version of that.
22:08
And so when I look at the outcomes, for my friends, none of them went to college.
22:09
A couple of them landed in jail.
22:09
One of them was shot to death, just a total, a total divergence compared to what I saw for my friends in college; every single one of my friends in college was raised by their parents.
22:18
In one of my classes, my first year, I remember the professor took this anonymous survey.
22:23
It was a seminar about 20-something students, basically asking how many of us were raised by both of our birth parents, and out of 20, some students only two, it was me, and one other student said that we were not.
22:40
So, this was 90%-plus of the students there.
22:40
And that was not at all unusual.
22:44
What I found kind of surprising actually is that even my former enlisted friends at Yale, there was a few of us, a few guys who had served and had gone to college on the GI bill, even they had been raised in a sort of intact kind of middle-class family, which I mean, I found a little bit
22:56
surprising because of the military, even though it's, I guess it's seen as sort of this more blue-collar, maybe middle-class environment, lower middle class, you get a little different, I guess, more diversity in terms of family backgrounds compared to a place like Yale, but even the guys who ended up going to Yale had that family background. I don't think it's a coincidence
23:05
I don't think it's a coincidence that if you come from a stable, secure background, family background, you end up getting into a pretty good school.
23:12
But again, I want to stress that even this, in a way, is a luxury belief, this preoccupation with getting into college.
23:18
I think that even if it made no difference at all, in terms of your educational prospects, I still think that it's good for kids to be sort of raised in a secured two-parent family.
23:28
Two parents, however, that looks, but something that's predictable and stable and nurturing for kids simply because of the sort of social and emotional consequences later on, not the educational-economic ones, but just what that does to a kid later.
23:43
It's worth mitigating that.
23:43
Another luxury belief, and this might be a little, we can get into it.
23:43
I don't know how controversial we can get here.
23:46
Jim O’Shaughnessy: We get really controversial.
23:49
Rob Henderson: But I actually just tweeted this, I think like a week ago. I broke down.
23:52
So I found a YouGov survey of, "Who is in support of defunding the police?"
23:58
And they broke this down by income.
23:58
And for people who made, I think it was less than $25,000 a year, it was around 20%.
24:04
For people who made between 25 and $50,000 a year, it was roughly the same about 20%.
24:09
But for people who made more than a $100,000 a year, it was into the 30s.
24:09
It was like 35% or something.
24:16
And so basically the group of people in the US who are the most in favor of defunding the police are the wealthiest Americans.
24:20
And to me, this is just, I mean, this is utterly insane because the people, I mean, this is the definition of a luxury belief because the people who are going to be paying the costs for fewer police or no police are going to be the poorest people because they're the ones who are the most likely to be victimized by crime.
24:33
I've shared data, I think this was from the FBI, that compared to Americans who make $75,000 or more a year, the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault, seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, and 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault.
24:48
And so if you're a poor person, you're much more likely to be affected in some way by crime.
24:54
And the other thing, we have these categories of rich and poor and upper-class and lower-class, but then when you zoom in, like on a more granular level, who are the victimizers?
24:59
Who are the offenders robbing and assaulting people?
25:04
While these tend to be young men, and then who are the victims?
25:09
While it tends to be either elderly people or women.
25:09
The people who are getting robbed tend to be elderly because they make easy targets.
25:14
And of course, in terms of sexual assault.
25:14
And so it's disproportionately women, and so we can talk about, "Oh, the poor victimizing the poor," but then, like when you zoom in closer, it's actually young guys hurting the elderly and hurting women.
25:28
And I think this is something that people at least claim to be concerned about, protecting the most vulnerable people in our society.
25:33
And so I think this is, quite straightforwardly, a definition of this.
25:37
Yeah, it just is mind blowing because last year I read this interesting, this article, this was at the height, I think, of some of the protests and stuff that were going on.
25:46
A lot of the wealthy people in the Northeast were vacationing in the Hamptons and sort of going to more secluded areas in the midst of COVID and in the midst of all the social unrest that was going on, and this article was outlining how much they had paid for private security and how they had private body guards.
25:59
And, basically, these people, the people who are most in favor of defunding the police, are also the ones who are the most able to afford private security to hire the big guy with the earpiece to protect them.
26:06
And I guess the rest of us just don't get any protection at all.
26:12
It's really, for me, it's a little bit personal because my family lives now, they live in the Bay Area in California, and there have been protests there.
26:20
There has been a spike in crime.
26:20
And my mother is a small Asian woman.
26:20
She's not going to be in the best position if crime starts to spike even more.
26:26
So those are a couple there we can get into more if you like, but yeah.
26:31
I've been over time, gradually saving ideas that I've had.
26:36
What are these luxury beliefs?
26:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So- Rob Henderson: Another one. Oh, go ahead.
26:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, yeah. Go, please.
26:38
Rob Henderson: Well, I was just going to, one more we can throw in and maybe get into is that this proliferation of addictive technology, there've been interesting articles.
26:39
I think I saw one in Newsweek, for example, about how a lot of the sort of tech tycoons who sell addictive technology are very strict in terms of how they monitor it in their own homes.
26:53
The famous example of, is a lot of people know that Steve Jobs famously wouldn't let his kids have iPads.
26:57
Reports of babbling, Bill Gates doesn't, I think he has one family computer in his home when the kids were growing up.
27:00
A lot of these, they tell them their nannies to carefully take care, monitor how much their children are using their phones.
27:02
A lot of the schools, the private schools that the wealthy send their kids to, they're not allowed to have phones, or they lock them away for the afternoon or something while the kids are studying.
27:10
But meanwhile, the rest of us, we have all this, these endless temptations everywhere we look, the author, Steve Hely; he has this book, How I Became a Famous Novelist.
27:15
I think it's a fictional book, but there's this great passage in there about how basically modern writers should get way more credit than the writers of the past.
27:24
He says, "Charles Dickens didn't have anything better to do than attend a public hanging and eat some mutton.
27:28
Whereas today, if you're at your laptop trying to write something, you have all of these notifications going off, email, your phone, like everything.
27:38
Everyone's trying to get a piece of you, every thing is trying to get your attention.
27:40
You have behavioral scientists funded by the wealthiest companies in the world, trying to manipulate you into clicking this or opening that."
27:48
And yeah, I mean, I personally can feel that as a PhD student trying to write papers and it's just so tempting to open up Twitter or something.
27:51
So I think this in itself is also a kind of a luxury belief in a way, if a lot of this technology had existed when I was a kid, I came of age right before all this took off.
28:00
Yeah, I don't know how my life would have gone if YouTube and all of these things had been around when I was a kid, it would have been hard for me to resist.
28:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So one of the things that strikes me is, what do you think caused this disconnect?
28:10
Because when I was growing up, the elites in quotes were seen as stolid, very sort of hardworking, God and country, all of these things that people aspired to.
28:19
And I think actually was a good thing that they aspired to.
28:29
So, for example, I've long said that we now have the worst political class in my memory, ever.
28:36
And then you contrast that with George Marshall, who, as secretary of state, decided, "Hey, you know what?
28:43
Let's instead of punishing Japan and Germany, what about rebuilding them?
28:49
Maybe that might be a better idea."
28:54
And then you start looking at the caliber of men and women who went in to government service.
28:54
And it was almost a foregone conclusion that if you came from the upper-class and you had done well in business, you owed the government some service guys like George Marshall, et cetera, et cetera.
29:15
And now, I call them Congress critters and have suggested that we make them wear uniforms like the F1 drivers, so that we can know what companies have bought them.
29:21
And it just seems to me, what do you think changed?
29:26
Because these are crap beliefs that you are, I'm especially sensitive to the second one you mentioned about when I hear people, contemporaries of mine, who are quite rich, espouse like, "Yeah, we should end the police."
29:37
I look at them and I just, I literally say, "Are you insane?"
29:43
The only people who will suffer, it aren't us.
29:43
It's going to be all the people who actually, really need police protection.
29:50
So it just seems to me, how did we get so dumb? Rob Henderson: Yeah.
29:58
Well, I think so, one of the claims that I make in my writings about luxury beliefs is the way that social status has shifted away from material goods.
30:02
So I think at least up until sort of the mid-20th century when goods had become more affordable prior to that, goods were a much stronger indicator of your social position in society, it was much easier in the early 20th century to walk down the street of a major city and sort of just pinpoint just by how they look, who's rich and who's poor.
30:20
Oh, that guy is rich and that guy is poor.
30:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, the [inaudible] is vanity fair, right? Rob Henderson: Right. Yeah.
30:27
And I think it's much harder today.
30:27
If you walk down the street of a major city, you can't necessarily pinpoint who's poor, who's middle-class, who's rich just by their appearance.
30:37
And so the way that people now indicate their social position in society is by having unusual or novel beliefs.
30:42
And in a way, I think this is dangerous because if you're sort of more working class or blue-collar person, and you sort of are closer to daily realities, you're not as insulated from it.
30:53
You basically have to have beliefs that are more aligned with reality, at least, for certain kinds of common sensical beliefs like, maybe we should have some police around because occasionally bad people do bad things, but if you're insulated from that one way to distinguish yourself from having that sort of common sensical conventional view is by sort of expressing strange opinions that only someone who's insulated could express.
31:16
I use this sort of analogy of the handicap principle or the peacock's tail.
31:16
There is this, borrowing from that, it's almost like this costly signal of only someone who was educated at elite universities and is so sealed off from daily reality could have these sort of unusual or novel beliefs about how we should defund the police or how we should, how everyone else should be addicted to certain kinds of technologies and so on.
31:39
I think that over time, so that's one aspect.
31:41
I think, is this sort of signaling component to it.
31:41
The way that the signals have shifted from material goods to beliefs.
31:44
And the other thing, the other part of that actually, is that beliefs can more rapidly change.
31:47
So fashion, sort of material fashion, is slow.
31:51
It's sort of constrained by the speed with which you could adopt a new look, this is out of fashion, but now I have to go buy these clothes and put these ones on.
31:54
But for beliefs, as soon as something takes off on Twitter and then all of your favored, your political parties, mainstream media outlets start saying, "Here's the correct belief that you're supposed to have."
32:05
Instantly everyone gets the software update and say like, "Oh, that's what I'm suppose to believe now."
32:07
And it can happen much faster in the age of social media and mass media.
32:11
I think there's something else here.
32:11
And this is something that I've been wrestling with because, in many ways, I'm very grateful for the kind of system that we have because of the way that my life has turned out, it is more meritocratic.
32:19
I know there's a lot of debate about meritocracy, and I know that we don't have a perfect meritocracy, but I think it is more meritocratic than it was in decades past when certain kinds of people were blocked off because of the way they looked or the social class that they were born into, but this can create some instability too.
32:33
If you read some of Peter Turchin's work; Ages of Discord and some of his other ideas on intra-elite competition.
32:39
In the past, when your social position was more secure in society, I think that you probably didn't have to worry as much about rivals undercutting you.
32:48
You simply because there were these rigid divisions between classes and between sort of factions of elites.
32:54
Whereas now, because things are more permeable and people can more quickly rise and fall, there's more anxiety among the elites and the aspirational elites.
33:07
I mean, the amount of anxiety I saw among both undergraduates and graduate students and people who have graduated from the elite universities, it's something that was totally shocking to me because, in my mind, I thought, once you get that admission letter to Yale, you've made it.
33:21
You never have to worry about anything ever again, like that's Willy Wonka's golden ticket.
33:25
You're set, but that's not how it is.
33:25
At least that's not how they treat it. That's how I treated it.
33:30
But that's not what I saw; getting in was like, step one for them.
33:33
And then it's getting in, and getting the right internship, and getting into the right law school, and getting the right job, getting into the right investment bank, or whatever, because all of these people are in constant competition with one another.
33:40
And so I think this [inaudible] can also give rise to sort of perverse in twisted kinds of beliefs as well, and different kinds of opinions, because there's this sort of arms race to show that you are the most morally righteous.
33:52
Which is a status currency now among the elite in a way that, it wasn't necessarily that way in the past.
33:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So the other thing that is fascinating about this to me is this idea of signaling, and I just sometimes do wonder what happens if a certain group, who we would consider elites, for example, started calling these people out?
34:14
They started saying, "Are you insane?
34:14
Are you really that stupid?"
34:21
I mean, hitting all those buttons because I've always found that the most aspirational people are also the most nervous and anxious about how they appear to other people.
34:33
I've been very lucky in my life in that I don't really give a fuck what anyone thinks about me, but I have seen it and I watch it because it's just, I can't help myself.
34:39
It's just so fascinating.
34:45
It's like anthropology in real-time.
34:45
Would that work, do you think?
34:45
Do you think if all of a sudden there was a group of people that people really aspire to be like, and they were like, "Well, let's do a symposium and talk about how these beliefs of yours are utterly ridiculous, and why on earth are you maintaining them?"
35:04
Do you think that would have any effect or no?
35:09
Rob Henderson: I think it would. Yeah. I think it would.
35:10
And I think to some extent it does. Yeah.
35:10
I've been thinking more about who influences society?
35:14
Who gets to decide what things that we talk about?
35:14
And I think, yeah, what you said, people who others aspire to be, people who hold the right, whatever the right status, the right position, credentials, or whatever, for better or worse, that's just how society works.
35:23
That if you want to be taken seriously, you have to sort of hit those markers.
35:27
I think that we are seeing this to some degree, you'd mentioned some of the folks who've left their positions at media outlets and started their own sub-stacks and the kind of influence that they're having.
35:36
I think that's been very valuable.
35:40
I've even been surprised at and somewhat dismayed at how people even listened to what I have to say.
35:45
Because I don't think that way, because I'm thinking what I'm saying, to me, isn't that special or unique or interesting.
35:48
I think I'm just kind of espousing roughly common sense in my own sort of, with my own personal touch on it, but the way that people respond to it, it's just mind-blowing.
35:56
And I realized that maybe there is this sort of dearth of people who are espousing common sense.
36:00
And I think this is sort of related to luxury beliefs.
36:03
That common sense is actually vulgar; it's gauche to say things that make perfect sense.
36:03
And if you want to be sort of a member of the elite, you have to say things that are not common sense in a way.
36:14
So I think it does work, and I've actually been, I remember when, so I was at Yale during a period of great sort of campus unrest.
36:17
There were a lot of student protests going on in the fall of 2015.
36:21
And I remember I talked to this professor, Sir Jonathan Haidt, who you may have heard of, he's a social psychologist at NYU.
36:24
He had come to give a talk at Yale.
36:24
I emailed him after sort of asking him about what he thought about what was going on, but he responded, he said, "Do you think that most students' sort of agree with what's going on with the protests and demanding that these professors be fired, or do you think it's just a small group of dedicated activists who are pushing for this?"
36:44
And I replied, "I think it's just a small number, but everyone else is just keeping their mouth shut.
36:48
So I don't know if that matters."
36:50
If you have this Taleb’s minority role or the 10% rule or something that if you have a small number of dedicated people and the rest are just sort of passive and go along with whatever, and they're not saying anything, then that 10% get to dictate the terms of the conversation and what the norms are and what the rules are.
37:05
And I saw exactly that play out and it was stunning to me.
37:09
And so sort of the more I reflect on the role of influence and sort of who gets taken seriously, and so on.
37:14
There does seem to be this effect of, if you have a belief, you should express it.
37:18
Especially, if it challenges sort of whatever the elite conventional wisdom happens to be because there can be this domino effect.
37:22
I've noticed that if I'm more outspoken about certain issues, I've noticed that other people are more willing to be as well, and that can be very important too. There was ...
37:30
I think it was actually in the [inaudible] book.
37:30
On his book on [inaudible] Theory.
37:34
He cites this political scientist [inaudible] this phrase, this eye-roll of silence, where essentially one way that sort of laws and norms can quickly get out of control, is because people are silent.
37:41
And they're just sort of passively going along with it.
37:41
Which is related to this other idea called the Abilene Paradox.
37:46
Just for the listeners, so the Abilene Paradox, it's this idea ...
37:51
So they give the author of the idea, I think his name is Jerry Harvey.
37:54
The scenario is, there are three people who are trying to decide where to go for dinner.
37:59
And one of them suggest they travel to a city called Abilene [inaudible] throwing this out as a suggestion.
38:02
How about we travel to Abilene?
38:02
The second person doesn't want to rock the boat.
38:08
Doesn't want to sort of create an argument, doesn't want to get in.
38:08
So just say like, "Yeah, sure. That sounds fine. We can go to Abilene."
38:13
Person C, sees both of these two people suggest Abilene and thinks, oh, well, there's a majority.
38:16
I don't want to go against the majority here.
38:16
So I guess I should say, "Let's go to Abilene."
38:20
And so now you have three people going to a city that none of them want to go to, simply because one person suggested as an idea and no one else wants to speak out against it.
38:28
And I think oftentimes, we see that happening.
38:31
So many people have talked to me about things that I've written here at Cambridge when I was a student as well at Yale, privately saying things like, "I really agree with that, or I really liked the way that you put that."
38:39
But they won't say anything publicly because they're afraid.
38:42
But then once there's a sort of critical mass reached, more people will start to speak out.
38:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So yeah.
38:47
It's kind of like the private knowledge, public knowledge, right?
38:49
Where for example, privately, a lot of people knew Weinstein was a rapist and they would never speak out on it.
38:54
And then somebody, some brave person, I think it was Rose McDonald in that case, called him out publicly on it.
38:59
It's The Emperor Has No Clothes.
39:04
And then all of a sudden, everyone is like, yeah. And everyone piles it.
42:30
One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, was this whole idea of, how is victim hood sexy in any way?
42:33
I mean, it seems to me that, I'm a victim.
42:39
I mean, if you really want to program yourself to fail, you declare yourself a victim, you blame someone else, you surrender all of your agency.
42:45
You're done as far as I'm concerned.
42:50
You're just not going to make it.
42:50
And so, I kind of think ... I'm a rational optimist. Right?
42:50
And I think that I see a lot of trends that I think are actually quite good for this emotional plague, that we've been living through to end.
43:02
And of course, there are problems, right?
43:02
We've given up religion and politics is the new religion. And I don't ...
43:07
My only tendency is to be fiercely anti-authoritarian.
43:12
So I don't have a political party.
43:12
Because a pox on both of them for wanting to have everyone sort of just get deep down into ideology and dogma.
43:26
That's the depth of thought as far as I'm concerned.
43:26
And it almost seems to me to be like, oh, you know what I want to do?
43:30
I'm going to have inflexible beliefs.
43:30
I'm going to become a non-player character, so that I can fit in.
43:35
I mean, that is so fucking crazy to me. And it's just like ...
43:42
But I'm now in this environment where I find people like you, like Vatsal and I'm not loving it.
43:46
Because there are so many good ideas, that now we can talk about.
43:52
Now that people can self-select and listen to this podcast and think it over and think, huh, that's really interesting.
43:58
And so, I think that the new period where we're moving into, hopefully, hopefully, will lead to more of that and not less.
44:03
But what do you think about ...
44:03
Vatsal actually, I'm going to let you ask this question.
44:09
Because the media overlay here, becomes important.
44:15
And I would love to get Rob's take on that. Vatsal Kaushik: Yeah. So as we ...
44:18
You just told us that being rich financially, is not enough to be a part of the elite class. Right?
44:23
And TV shows helped you realize that there are other boxes that need to be checked if you want to get into the elite class.
44:28
I was wondering if social media – Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, has now taken over TV shows, or movies as the main medium of that identity change?
44:40
Or do TV shows and movies still remain the primary source of that shift?
44:45
Rob Henderson: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
44:45
Well, first I mean, I got to say that I'm not on TikTok.
44:47
I'm sort of like my younger sister taught me how to use Instagram fairly recently.
44:52
So Twitter has been my main platform.
44:52
But that's an interesting question.
44:52
So I wrote a long-form essay in the New York Times then I published the uncut version, which is much longer on my newsletter.
45:00
And for me, TV played a huge role in helping me to understand what are the alternative kinds of lives that I could possibly lead?
45:07
And even though it took me a while to get there, the images that I saw, had remained with me into my early adulthood as I considered education and so on.
45:11
And sort of what social class was.
45:16
I want to say it probably doesn't have ...
45:16
Social media, TikTok this kind of thing.
45:16
I don't think it would have necessarily the same kind of class markers, or the same class cues.
45:17
TikTok videos are so fast and the sort of trends that they portray, seem to be so much more fleeting.
45:29
I think class is a little bit more enduring than.
45:29
But yeah, I guess I would have to say I'm not entirely sure.
45:33
I think that for now at least, things could be changing, but I think for now TV shows and movies, they have a kind of a cultural cache that is still stronger than social media and some of these platforms.
45:44
I think a lot of influencers say on Instagram, are trying to leverage that into a TV deal, or a movie deal.
45:50
But very few people are trying to make a movie with the hopes of becoming an Instagram influencer.
45:56
So there's still this sort of step that you have to take.
46:00
And it's still considered more prestigious to be in a Hollywood film, or something than to be on social media.
46:03
Although I did just share this interesting article.
46:06
I think it was in a foreign policy about this Instagram influencer, who had taken some kind of job as a sports journalist.
46:12
I guess she has no real qualifications to do this, except having a couple million followers on Instagram, or something.
46:16
Got this job and tweeted about it.
46:21
And then she got ratio’d tons of negative comments on her tweet, from you graduates of elite journalism schools saying, "You didn't even study this.
46:26
And I went to the top school and you're getting a job and I don't have this job. That's not fair."
46:31
Because people are still sort of stuck in that old mindset of you have to sort of follow that traditional path, in order to be successful.
46:40
But things are changing now.
46:40
So we could see becoming an influencer at some point, actually being more important than having those sort of traditional markers of status.
46:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So that's another really interesting topic to me.
46:50
Because I definitely think that the accreditation phase ...
46:50
Or I'm all in favor of going to college.
46:55
For example, my daughter graduated from Yale in 2010, so I know a lot about Yale.
46:55
And my other two kids graduated from Notre Dame at various years.
47:01
So obviously, they went to really great schools.
47:08
I would almost say that the socialization factor of being able to attend one of those universities, is far more valuable than the degree itself.
47:16
And so, I'm certainly not telling people not to go to college, but I don't think in this new era, that the ...
47:21
So a degree isn't accreditation, in my opinion, that suggests competence. Right? Rob Henderson: Yeah.
47:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Whereas, Vatsal for example, I watched him for, I don't know, nine months on Twitter.
47:33
And he was auditioning every day, even though he didn't know it.
47:40
And so, his actual work product and output, was what made me offer him this position as my colleague on Infinite Loops.
47:54
I see that happening more and more and more.
47:54
So kind of like, there's almost, you're going to have double power if you've got an elite degree and also, are actually competent.
48:04
Rob Henderson: Those two things don't always go together.
48:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, they don't. No, I know they don't.
48:10
Boy, do I ever know that.
48:10
And so, I think that the challenge as I kind of think about this, is ...
48:16
Listen, this whole great reshuffle, there's going to be a lot of casualties as well, in my opinion.
49:55
And you see that because people crave certainty.
49:55
And as you outlined in our earlier chat, certainty is really important for a lot of people, especially when they're growing up.
50:07
But in many cases, it's an illusion of certainty, I think.
50:07
And so, when a lot is going on, right and things are speeding up and getting very, very complicated, people want simple answers, right?
50:19
And so, that leads to simplistic thought, that leads to all this nonsense that you see on the various conspiracies. And I get that.
50:25
And so, maybe you could help me. You're a great mind.
50:32
Is there a way to not only mitigate that, but sort of actively get people to say, "Hey, maybe I should rethink this."
50:40
Or is this just too crazy? Rob Henderson: Yeah.
50:46
I mean, I've shared some of the stats, posted some of them on Twitter.
50:49
And written about how trust in all institutions, has been declining all throughout the 20th and 21st centuries for both political parties by the way.
50:54
Of course, there's small differences.
50:59
Like whenever one of their [inaudible] of candidates is in power, they have a little increase in trust and then the next guy gets elected and then it goes down.
51:06
But by and large, the overall trend line is a sharp, in terms of trust in the government, trust in media, trust in one another.
51:11
I mean, so the youngest Americans, it's something like they're more than twice as likely to say that most people can't be trusted, compared to Americans who are over 65 years old.
51:20
I think it's something like, so for millennials and gen Z, something like 25 or 30% of ... No, I'm sorry.
51:26
About 60 to 70% of them say, most people can't be trusted.
51:29
Whereas, for people who are over 65, say something like, 25 to 30% are more likely to say that.
51:33
So basically, trust is declining overall, especially when young people ...
51:37
I'm not sure what could ...
51:37
Exactly what's accounting for this and how to mitigate it.
51:41
One idea that I thought was pretty interesting, was from the economist Mr.
51:46
Tyler Cowen, who runs the Marginal Revolution blog and sort of a well-known author.
51:49
He discussed how, maybe of course the general the idea is that more information is always better and transparency is always good and so on.
51:53
But he suggested that actually, if you see too much, this can actually instill some degree of cynicism.
52:00
And I think one example of this, is social media.
52:05
I mean, when I see the way that politicians and journalists and establishment figures interact with each other and the things that they post online, of course the most probably most prominent famous example of this was our last president.
52:16
Was just the behavior of it, was just so odious and so undignified.
52:21
And so, if you're a 15 year old kid seeing how your nation's leaders and the most influential and powerful people, are behaving online, how are you supposed to trust them?
52:33
How do you trust that this person is going to do the right thing in a crisis or an emergency?
52:38
The rapid turnaround time ...
52:38
I mean, what we saw throughout the pandemic, the messaging on masks for example, was just a total disaster.
52:42
And one minute the CDC is tweeting this and then the next they're saying that.
52:46
And there's just a lot of inconsistencies there.
52:46
And yeah, I don't think a lot of it's not necessarily malice.
52:50
But people who are distrustful, are quick to read malice into all of this.
52:56
They don't trust them, they think there's some kind of sinister edge bender going on.
52:59
I think that one possible small step to mitigate it would be ...
52:59
If there was a way to encourage people, especially people who are in influential positions, to just think more carefully about what you're about to tweet, or if you're tweeting from your sort of verified blue check official account ...
53:16
I know people would hate this idea.
53:16
I'm just throwing it out there.
53:20
If this sort of algorithm or something could read your tweet for you and then just say, are you sure you want to post this as the CEO of this company, or as a Senator of this state?
53:31
Are you sure you want to post this?
53:31
And then if you say yes, it'll post.
53:31
But just that one little small second, a little bit of added friction before you make a fool of yourself, or just sort of degrade the position you were trusted to hold, I think that could be one.
53:45
I mean, yeah if I saw a lot of this going on when I was 13, I mean, I was already kind of a little shit head.
53:50
But if I had seen what was going on, it would have been way worse.
53:50
Because in the back of my mind, I thought there were still adults running this show, but now, it's like are adults running the show? No, I'm not sure. Maybe. Maybe not. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
54:02
So I agree with that assessment.
54:02
I always joke that I have a Twitter prevention team 24-7, that physically knocked the bone out of my hand.
54:07
And I like your thought about the one second delay, because it actually, that could be quite helpful.
54:13
Just a moments pause, right?
54:13
It's like, do I really want to do that?
54:18
I cannot tell you the number of tweets that I start and then stop.
54:22
And it's like literally, do I really want to ...
54:22
I mean, I'm I really going to do this?
54:24
No, I'm not going to do that.
54:24
So I think that also this idea of the political class, the journalistic class, listen, all of our old hierarchies in my opinion, are crumbling.
54:38
And that doesn't mean that we're going to go Mad Max here.
54:38
It means, in my opinion, that new ones will emerge slowly.
54:45
Sometimes not slowly, to take advantage of this chaotic mess in terms of the political class.
54:52
For example, I'm actually worried about the political class being able to catch up.
54:59
They are so far behind us, in terms of what's happening in the private sector and in technology and cultural evolution, that they're trying to manage to a world that stop existing in the early '70s, in my opinion.
56:41
Final topic that I want to talk about a little bit.
56:41
Vatsal and I were kind of joking around. We talk once a week.
56:45
And I was talking about the idea that ...
56:45
I was actually talking about George Marshall with him.
56:50
And how America finally got the idea, the right idea in my opinion. That empires were bad.
56:59
In other words, physical empires.
56:59
Where you went and you displaced local populations. You took their goods. Very [inaudible] system.
57:06
And America was like, "Yeah, no, we don't want to do that.
57:12
We want a cultural empire.
57:12
We want to export ideas.
57:12
I had sent him, or you had found, Vatsal, I can't remember. I think I sent it.
57:21
Vatsal Kaushik: You sent it.
57:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The Rob Stein America video.
57:24
I don't know if you've ever seen that, Rob?
57:28
Rob Henderson: Yes, I have. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay. So what do you think?
57:31
Do you think that we're still exporting these cultural ideas?
57:31
I think you do, because I know the last piece I read of yours, you think we're exporting some pretty bad ones. Rob Henderson: Yeah. Well, the story there... So this was last year.
57:44
I had written a bit about cancel culture, a couple of different pieces I think in City Journal in Psychology Today, and this media outlet from the Netherlands approached me, apparently, I talked to a Dutch friend of mine.
57:54
I asked him, "Is this legit?
57:54
Should I talk to this person?"
57:58
And my friends said "Oh, that's one of the biggest online media outlets in the Netherlands." And I said, "okay.
58:01
” So I respond to this journalist who was putting together a video, asking people their thoughts on cancel culture.
58:06
He and I talked for a few minutes and I shared my thoughts, mostly I think it's bad.
58:11
He put the video online a few days later, the journalist and it went live on their website and it collected somewhere in the neighborhood of almost 200,000 views, which for the Netherlands is really big because they have a very small population.
58:25
Then my Dutch friend, I sent it to him and he sent it to all of his friends in the Netherlands.
58:25
Then he got back to me a couple of days later, it was like, "Hey, this video was taken down.
58:30
Do you know what's going on here?"
58:32
I saw that it was taken down.
58:32
I emailed the journalist and the journalist replied to me saying, "My boss decided to take it down.
58:42
Basically, they said that it was too sympathetic to the victims of cancel culture, that it questioned canceled culture too much and it was not in support of it," and that was basically the main reason why they took it down.
58:51
So then I wrote this piece basically saying, a video questioning cancel culture has been canceled. I talked to my friend.
58:56
So he's a PhD in sociology, doing a postdoc now.
59:03
He told me, "This kind of thing would have been unthinkable a few years ago in the Netherlands.
59:07
This idea of putting a video up and then it doesn't have the right belief for the right point of view and so now we have to take it down."
59:11
He said, "This is a very American thing."
59:14
My general claim here is that Americans, we used to export culture.
59:19
As you said, we exported, blue jeans and Elvis and Hollywood movies and now, we're exporting luxury beliefs.
59:25
We're exporting cancel culture.
59:25
We're exporting what beliefs are proper to have, what you're supposed to think about things about political or social or moral issues.
59:34
To me, I think it's not a good export.
59:34
What we used to export was better.
59:40
The other thing is, to see the kinds of influence that we're having now, I think it's a pretty disappointing thing.
59:44
A lot of people, there's this, at least in...
59:44
I had this conversation, actually, this was a few years ago, with this young woman.
59:46
I think she was from Romania.
59:51
I asked her, "What do you think of America?"
59:51
A lot of Eastern Europeans have a completely different view, because them and their families still have memories of communism and totalitarian regime and so on.
1:00:03
She said, "America is the dream.
1:00:03
This is a wonderful country."
1:00:03
A lot of people would love to move there. Romanians, they love it.
1:00:08
That was much different than a lot of conversations I had with people from Western Europe and a lot of people that I speak to here in the UK.
1:00:16
The views of America are shifting and turning into a more negative direction in a lot of ways, which I think is pretty disappointing.
1:00:22
I think that we could do a lot better. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I agree.
1:00:27
I think that what you need to do is just do it.
1:00:27
You need to have people like you on a podcast, or people like Vatsal, you need to walk the walk.
1:00:34
I think that that has small incremental changes, but it's kind of like compounding.
1:00:42
You never want to interrupt positive compounding because it's very slow and you don't notice anything.
1:00:49
You don't notice anything you don't notice.
1:00:49
Then all of a sudden, you own all the rice in the world.
1:00:53
Rob Henderson: I actually had that exact experience with my Twitter account actually.
1:00:55
Which, I just started posting so book excerpts and some random thoughts, and it was a slow trickle.
1:01:00
Then after about a year, a year and a half, it suddenly started getting a lot of attention and being retweeted by bigger and bigger accounts. I never expected that.
1:01:11
It was almost like a, oh, this is a place where I can go to catch up on all of the cool excerpts that I've been reading and to remind myself of all the cool stuff that I've been looking at.
1:01:20
Then to see that other people were following it and responding to it, it was pretty unreal.
1:01:26
Then this similar thing happened with my newsletter.
1:01:26
I think there is this craving for alternative points of view outside of, like you had mentioned, the legacy media.
1:01:35
People who are thinking about issues in different ways.
1:01:35
There's a lot of curious people out there.
1:01:39
That has been actually, gratifying to see, and it gives me a lot of hope.
1:01:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree on the curiosity.
1:01:42
I think that attention is the new gold.
1:01:46
I think if you don't understand that, you're not going to do very well.
1:01:52
The click bait farms, all of that with, the dopamine hits, you've just got to be brutal. You've got to...
1:01:59
I joke about it with Vatsal all the time.
1:01:59
If you saw my mute list on Twitter.
1:02:04
I don't block because I don't want to block them unless they're just some horrible troll.
1:02:09
Luckily, I don't seem to attract too many horrible trolls, but I've gotten so used to mute, mute, mute, just because the curation aspect.
1:02:15
Right now, one of the problems I think Americans have in particular Americans, is America is so big.
1:04:02
If you don't travel extensively, you don't really understand how much weight America carries in the psyche of the rest of the world.
1:04:16
In my opinion, that is a duty.
1:04:16
We have a duty to understand that and try to at least get people kind of focus to, "Hey, isn't it cool that 100,000 people aren't dying of explosive diarrhea. isn't it cool?"
1:04:31
I was shocked, even myself. So I love Africa.
1:04:36
I was in Nairobi and I started noticing all of these posters of George W. Bush. I'm like, "Okay."
1:04:44
So I become very friendly with the guide.
1:04:44
I'm like, " You got to explain this to me. What is going on?
1:04:49
He was not the most popular president in the United States."
1:04:56
He goes, "Oh, he's a hero in Africa." I was like, "Why?" He goes, "AIDS.
1:04:56
He released all of the AIDS cocktails for free.
1:05:06
He saved thousands, hundreds of thousands of life."
1:05:14
As an American, I didn't know that.
1:05:14
And yet, you're in Nairobi with all these posters of George Bush.
1:05:20
If you're curious, you're going to put two and two together.
1:05:20
That's the kind of America that I would love to see more of, because... Go ahead.
1:05:27
Rob Henderson: I just want to say, so a similar story.
1:05:28
My girlfriend, she's here with me, but her family lives in Malaysia.
1:05:28
We had recently read that the US had basically just donated a ton of free COVID vaccines to Malaysia and no one knows about this.
1:05:41
This wasn't really widely covered very much in the media, but the US is apparently giving tons of free COVID vaccines to developing countries.
1:05:44
Sometimes I think that the confidence that is lacking in American citizens, because we don't know about these things.
1:05:50
We're constantly criticizing and self-criticizing.
1:05:55
I know America has a lot of problems and a lot of challenges that we need to address and so on, but we do a lot of good things too.
1:06:01
Can we get a little bit of credit and a little bit of coverage and understanding that it's not 100% percent evil?
1:06:08
Sometimes there are good things that happen.
1:06:08
It's something that I think that...
1:06:08
No one doesn't like that.
1:06:13
When Americans hear about stories like that, they feel good about it.
1:06:13
We don't think, "Well, why do they get the vaccines?
1:06:18
Why don't we get some vaccines? Those are our vaccines." No one thinks that way.
1:06:21
Everyone thinks, "Wow, that's a really good thing.
1:06:21
That's nice that we're actually doing that."
1:06:24
They're kind of surprised because no one expects America to do nice things.
1:06:29
It reminds me, I saw this interesting stat.
1:06:29
So this is about the show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
1:06:33
There's the famous lifelines.
1:06:33
One of the lifelines is asking the audience.
1:06:33
If you're stuck on a question, you can ask the audience for help.
1:06:38
In the US, more than 90% of audience members report that they give the right answer.
1:06:45
If they see someone who needs help and they know the answer, 90% of them say they try to give them the right answer.
1:06:49
Whereas, they asked the same question in Russia.
1:06:52
So the Russians have a similar version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
1:06:56
It was something like less than 30% of Russians give the right answer.
1:06:56
The reason why, is at least according to the author's interpretation of the statistic, which is that there's this culture of not wanting others to be successful.
1:07:03
There's underlying envy, which may be a hold over from communism and the brutality and impoverishment that they lived through and so on, but it's just a completely different mindset.
1:07:14
Americans like seeing other people succeed and want to help others.
1:07:17
That's in the mindset of the culture, whereas that's not a universal by any means.
1:07:19
There are other cultures who don't necessarily enjoy witnessing others take things that they don't have, or have things that they don't have.
1:07:23
[inaudible] American in some ways.
1:07:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think it is.
1:07:29
I think that's another soap box of mine.
1:07:29
We still, despite everything...
1:07:29
The brightest people in the world for the most part want to live and work in America, and we should let them.
1:07:39
As a basic first step, if somebody gets a stem degree from an American institution, we should staple a green card to it.
1:07:46
Because listen, it's pretty straightforward.
1:07:46
Rule of law, freedom of speech, these are very conducive to creators creating.
1:08:00
I think that some more on the positive end is I always try to feature it, but of course, evolution made us very, very, very sensitive to novel dangers.
1:08:08
It's just part and parcel.
1:08:15
I think we'll move ahead, but anyway, this has been fantastic.
1:08:15
I want to have you back on after your book is published, when is the book due out?
1:08:21
Rob Henderson: We're looking, there's no set deadline or probably or set publication date, but probably late next year.
1:08:25
I got to sit with the manuscript here pretty soon so that's been my main project over the last year.
1:08:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Terrific.
1:08:31
I love to hear your writing. Okay.
1:08:31
So we have a question that we ask at the end of every podcast, which we think is kind of fun.
1:08:36
Some of the answers I've really just loved.
1:08:40
So we're going to make you the emperor of the world for one day. You can't kill anyone.
1:08:46
You can't send anyone to a reeducation camp, but you can incept ideas in them that they are going to think when they wake up the next day.
1:08:54
They're not going to think, "Oh, Rob told me to do that."
1:08:59
They're going to think that they thought that they should do this.
1:09:03
What two things are you going to incept in people?
1:09:03
Rob Henderson: Oh, two things now. Okay.
1:09:06
Well, so one thing I think would be to cultivate and maintain your relationships with other people.
1:09:10
I think this is overlooked.
1:09:10
This is overlooked across the social classes, but for different reasons.
1:09:14
Among the people that I'm around now, I think a lot of them are so focused on material and professional success that they're not really connecting with the people around them.
1:09:23
Then I think a lot of other guys that I grew up with, they have this, I don't know, this individual mindset or this mindset that they don't need anybody else, which I think holds a lot of people back too from becoming successful.
1:09:31
One of the things that helped me a lot, going back to the start of the conversation, another thing that had helped me was being willing to ask for help and to connect with other people and maintain those ties over the long-term.
1:09:42
So that's one, just maintaining relationships. The other one.
1:09:42
I'm not sure that I have an answer for the second one necessarily.
1:09:46
Maybe just, back on my soapbox from earlier about families and so on, would be to just before you have kids, to just really make sure that you're prepared for it.
1:09:56
This is actually an idea that I took from Dr. Drew Pinsky.
1:09:56
I've talked to him on his podcast as well.
1:10:01
That once you have children, it's not really about you anymore, it's about them.
1:10:01
Every decision you make, it's not about maximizing your own happiness.
1:10:06
Every decision should be more about, how can I ensure that this kid has a good outcome?
1:10:11
And again, emotionally and socially, not just professionally.
1:10:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that one.
1:10:18
I believe that very, very deeply.
1:10:18
I've been very lucky in my life because I not only have three great children and I have all of their spouses.
1:10:25
What are the odds I like them all?
1:10:31
And I even liked their families. Good Lord.
1:10:31
I have three beautiful grandchildren.
1:10:43
I think that I was very lucky because my wife and I were very simpatico.
1:10:43
We got married as children. We were 22.
1:11:22
Then we thought, "Well, okay, so we're crazy.
1:11:22
We might as well have our son Patrick at 24."
1:11:27
But we literally did discuss, "What are our objectives here?"
1:11:27
What we alighted on was we wanted to raise good adults.
1:11:34
If you think about that, if that's your line of code, it precludes all sorts of behaviors that are natural.
1:11:42
For example, you can't look at your child and say, "Because I said so, because you're living under my roof, because I am the one who makes the laws here."
1:11:55
That's not the way you treat a good adult.
1:11:55
So a lot of the natural instincts, when you have that, as your governing rule, you can't do it.
1:12:02
What happens is the child learns that they have a voice.
1:12:10
Even if you're offering a false choice, I used to joke with my kids, " You get to choose, you can do it the easy way or the hard way," but the idea was I always tried to present things to them as a choice for them.
1:12:23
Also, if they wanted to do something or not do something, I would say, "Sure, tell me why."
1:12:29
So critical thought, "Oh, I need to think about this," and just that kind of one rule, really, at least in our case, worked out really, really well.
1:12:43
So I agree with you though.
1:12:43
I think that it's not for nothing that one of the common things, if you study religions, for example, what do you think that almost every religion tries to do?
1:12:57
Rob Henderson: I'm just thinking about enforcing certain rules and taboos, but what is it?
1:13:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They try to separate children from their parents. Rob Henderson: Oh right.
1:13:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because they want to be mommy and daddy. They don't want...
1:13:08
Steven Pinker has a great book on this called The Blank Slate.
1:13:14
Vatsal Kaushik: It's also how so many terrorism organizations work. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:13:18
Rob Henderson: Oh, fascinating.
1:13:18
I've seen this with ideologies too.
1:13:18
Lately, I've been on this kick about reading about the history of communist movements in Maoist China and the Soviet Union. It's religion. It's ideology.
1:13:28
It's the movements don't want to compete with parents for the loyalty of children.
1:13:34
In some ways, it's understandable from the point of view of the ideology, but it's also something to keep in mind as we go forward and we see certain kinds of movements take off and how much they want to influence children and parents.
1:13:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: A couple of good books on that, The Weirdest People in the World, [inaudible].
1:13:48
It's academic and so I hesitate, but I keep going back to it so I did recommend it.
1:13:52
Eric Hoffer, are you familiar with his work? Rob Henderson: Yes.
1:13:57
Well, just the True Believer is the only one I'm...
1:13:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That was the one that I was going to recommend.
1:13:59
So Eric Hoffer, talk about meritocracy, he was a longshoreman who literally became one of the best known philosophers of his era.
1:14:10
Rob Henderson: That book is only 150 pages long and that just totally- Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's amazing. Rob Henderson: ... rocked my world. Totally transformed.
1:14:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's amazing. It's an amazing book.
1:14:14
Well, listen, this has been absolutely delightful.
1:14:14
You are a great guy and I can hardly wait to read your book.
1:14:22
This has been a lot of fun. Thank you for coming on.
1:14:28
What degree are you getting from Cambridge?
1:14:28
Rob Henderson: It'll be in just psychology, but my specialty is evolutionary and social psychology.
1:14:34
I'll probably be back in the US right around this time next year, hopefully, maybe a little bit later.
1:14:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you're in New York, let me know.
1:14:40
We'll have lunch or whatever.
1:14:43
Rob Henderson: Sounds great. Thanks.