[Music] and I was taken into the foster care system in LA and I was 3 years old at this point the standard approach is you know let's move the kid around a lot because if he gets too attached to anyone foster home a parent ranchers the picture the kid isn't going to want to go back with their mother or their father and that never happens but of course this creates in extreme instability for a kid if I was just going to be Devil's ad for I
would say rob you are a classic example of a meritocracy actually working there are limits to to this meritocracy idea I ended up okay but none of my five friends went to college two of them went to prison one of them was shot to death
what the military taught me was like you know motivation is just a feeling you know discipline is I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel well hello everyone it's Jibo shaas with yet another infinite Loops today
friend of the show my friend and very interesting author Rob Henderson is with us for those who are fans of the podcast you've heard Rob several times before uh Rob welcome today we're going to be talking about your new book which is released yes or it'll be February 20th February 20th okay so the title of the book is essentially troubled A Memoir of foster care family and social class uh let me start out by saying I
know a lot of this and I had the privilege of seeing uh the the gys of the book I think it's a tremendous book I recommend that everyone read the book um and uh you know with with that out of the way um let's start with your experiences in foster care we're like really harrowing when I read the book it was like holy [ __ ] um so for for our off uh for our uh listener and viewers uh benefit can can you maybe take us through the story a little bit
now obviously not not you don't have to root site the entire book but uh give us a picture of what that looked like and and also how it shaped your views on family stability which we're going to come to later yeah yeah sure yeah yeah thanks Jim I mean so I just WR so this is my fourth time on this show uh remember we spoke two years ago about luxury beliefs and then we've done a couple with with trun our friend trun
fan and uh yeah it's four fourth time um you're you're becoming a regular you're a regular man a regular yeah well I'm a big fan of the show too so yeah this is yeah um so yeah I mean I've been working on this book now it's been sort of five years in the making and yeah I will say that those early chapters prob the first half of the book I mean those were the hardest to write I mean which is kind of you know it's it's not surprising
because you know the last few years of my life have been really great but the you know the first half of my life or so has been less than optimal and so especially those early years I describe being born into poverty in Los Angeles um never knowing who my father uh was my birth mother uh and I you know she and I were homeless for a while when I was very young um when I was a baby we lived in a car uh for some time we eventually
settled in this slum apartment uh in LA and my mom was just you know eventually became very addicted to drugs you know neglectful unable to care for me eventually some neighbors called the police and they saw the state of our
apartment and you know the neglect and everything that was occurring there and so my mom um was arrested and I was taken into the foster care system in La uh and I was three years old at this point and so you know I I sort of opened
the book with the story and how i' lived in seven different homes over the next 5 years or so um all around uh Los Angeles some of these homes that I moved into had you know upwards of eight or 10 kids I just remember just sort of you know these homes were because the system is overburdened I mean there aren't that many you know people who are interested in being foster parents and there's just a lot of kids who need homes and so you
know I you know stay in a bunk like bunk bed with three or four to room in some cases um later uh I was uh placed into uh foster home the last home that I stayed in uh before I was adopted where I was the only kid and you know it was like either way it was unpleasant because in the one case when I had lost to Foster siblings um you know it was just like a fight all the time for basically every kind of resource attention food uh care attention
everything um clothes but then later when I was in that one home where there were no kids I just remember being lonely and the Foster mother who uh was responsible for me was just kind of cold and indifferent toward me and it would have been nice you know I remember thinking in that case it would have been nice to have some kids around some other kids but yeah it was hard I mean with all the Foster siblings I guess one thing that
people don't often think about with the Foster system is like not only are you as a child being frequently moved to different homes which is hard enough but then you're also seeing your Foster siblings constantly um removed from you
so you may build a bond you may uh develop a friendship with one of the kids and then maybe their mom uh sobers up or their dad re-enters the picture some relative uh decides that they can take care of the kid and so then the kid
is taken oftentimes not not often but occasionally they will return because their mom relapsed or because their dad was arrested or something along those lines and so it was just a lot of uncertainty and instability in day-to-day life when I was in these homes um some people have asked me so again I never knew my father my mother was deported so she was from um South Korea she was from the soul she came to the us as a young woman I didn't know my
father's background his ancestry until later I took a 23m me test recently uh and got my results and it turns out my dad was Mexican he was Hispanic um and I went my whole life the first what 32 or 33 years of my life not knowing this about myself um and so so people have asked me you know like why is it that you were moved all the time like you didn't have any relatives who could re-enter the picture who could come care
for you why were they you know moving you to different homes one reason for this is that um essentially when a kid is frequently relocated to different homes um the idea is to reduce the likelihood of any issues of attachment or loyalty um so the the standard approach is you know let's move the kid around a lot because if he gets too attached to any one foster home a parent ranchers the picture the kid isn't going
to want to go back with their mother or their father whoever it is because they've built this bond with the foster parents often the foster parents will become attached to the kid as well and they're reluctant to let them go
especially if they know there's a high likelihood that the birth relatives aren't going to remain sober or or in a position to care for the kid for very long they know that it's not going to be maybe the best for the kid and so they
just move the kid a lot frequently and that never happens but of course this creates in extreme instability for a kid maybe that strategy might work for kids who do have relatives who can re-enter the picture and care for them but for someone like me it was it was just needless it was completely um unnecessary and it would have been better I think for them to um you know by by the time I was you know about about a year before I was adopted I saw
a uh you know what we regularly had to like get checkups and the state ordered you know you got to see a psychiatrist you got to see a social worker you got to see this person and that person the other there was a psychiatrist at the LA Children's Hospital who like actually carefully reviewed my file and he was like wait you don't have any parents like you shouldn't be moving to Foster rooms all the time and so he made this
recommendation basically like we need to find a way to get this kid adopted because there's no other otherwise he's just going to be moving to different placements until he's 18 so then I was adopted um uh by this this family uh we settled into this kind of Dusty Blue Collar town in Northern California called Red Bluff um and so you know that was like sort of the first you know half or third of my childhood was the Foster
system and then uh yeah moving into this with with this family when I was seven my yeah my eth birthday was sort of just around the corner after I was adopted um but then I kind of got this I mean so I was adopted in the late 90s and I guess like one reason people have found kind of the you know the second chapter onward of my book interesting is that I kind of got this glimpse into sort of what's what's been happening to kind of working class
blueco collar areas in America um and this is like a segment of society that's often overlooked uh which is you know kind of the deterioration the rising rates of single Parenthood of family instability domestic abuse Strife separations because I I spend a lot of those chapters not only writing about my life and seeing My adoptive parents divorce and the kind of uh fallout as a result of that um but also my friends as
well you know I I made five close friends in Red Bluff when I was growing up and none of the six of us were raised by both of our parents um you my other five friends grew up in kind of garden variety broken homes dysfunctional homes
I had two friends raised by a single moms one friend raised by a single dad one friend who was raised by his grandmother because his dad was in prison and his mom was addicted to drugs I had another friend who you know was
raised by his aunt and then you know he's kind of bounced around different relatives because none of them were really in a position to uh sort of provision prolonged care and so that's like um that's like a very common picture of what life is like in these sort of poor impoverished communities um you know poor in a kind of relative sense I mean that's something else that I point out in the book too is like you know there we were
poor by American Standards but it wasn't you know I sometimes I'm I'm I'm uncomfortable with using the word poor that I grew up poor it is true in the context of you know a developed first world country but it was more squallor
it was more just people who were a little bit materially impoverished but mostly just making a lot of bad decisions and getting addicted to drugs or just sort of being neglectful or not really kind of kind of unfocused aimless
I mean this was sort of the beginning you know the early 2000s the kind of the beginning of the OPI crisis um you know this was kind of the early years of the the the housing crash and the financial crisis um and you know I was sort of seeing people make unwise financial decisions personal decisions and yeah it was it was it affected me it affected my My adoptive sister it affected my friends and so I I tell the story of how yes I had this very
uh unusual and and sort of positive upward trajectory with some hiccups and some setbacks along the way but generally I I ended up okay but none of my five friends went to college uh two of them went to prison uh one of them
was shot to death I mean that's like a normal uh that's like the modal outcome like the best maybe you could expect under ordinary circumstances is kind of working a menial job and you know staying staying uh out of trouble with
the law or not getting killed but otherwise um you know that's uh that's a very common sort of outcome and so I'm in a position to tell those stories uh you know no one's going to give my high school friends you I know I was going to give them a book deal so I thought it was important also to describe those outcomes as well because I really didn't want this to be that kind of typical you know just work hard and pull yourself up
by your bootstraps and anything's possible um those things are important you know I do make the point that hard work wasn't like I couldn't have got where I am today without hard work but there are so many other factors at play in terms of what predicts social Mobility and how to get out of a a really sort of chaotic and disorderly environment when you're when you're a kid or a teenager so anyway that's like the the very short version of this but
yeah happy to go wherever you want to go from there yeah I mean there's just so much to unpack there like you know the the policy decisions of of moving kids around like that conflicts with everything at least that I'm familiar
with in looking at early childhood development that uh you know the the fear of Abandonment the fear of rejection those are things that like Tim Larry said that we were always that we got uh imprinted at a very young age and
you are either imprinted with a winner this is his term so you know from the 70s long time ago so he used pretty direct words you know he said you know before the age of five you're imprinted with a winner script or a loser script you're you're uh imprinted with top dog or bot dog and and part of his work that actually is very compelling and is supported and replicated in in more traditional psychological research finds
that you know all of the things that you experience um are really detrimental to the development uh of a child and so like the first thing I'd ask about is you know I I hope that that isn't like an intentional thing right like you said on the face of it I guess I could say yeah I I understand that idea that the the actual parent comes back you wouldn't want the child to be you know resistant to going with their actual
parent and so I understand the logic but was there a lot of research put into it or did that system just develop the way it developed I think it was more of an organic you know people not really thinking through yeah I don't I
definitely don't think it was malicious and intent um probably people making sort of short-term convenient decisions and maybe sort of reverse you know sort of sort of yeah reverse justifying it backwards engineering it to to make
sense to make it uh palatable you know there's a there's a line I quoted my book from uh from the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christus um who comes up in the book later as well um but one of the points he makes in uh in his book blueprint uh The evolutionary origins of of a good Society uh which is a great book he describes how you know I'm paraphrasing but basically every Innovation and every policy around childcare in the United
States has basically been catered toward the interest of adults and what was important for kids is usually secondary um which you know in a way it's I mean it's it's it's sad but the it makes sense because adults are the ones with
the political power and the ability to implement policy and kids are you know they're they're they're naive they're unsophisticated they don't have political power and so you know if they have a preference for actually I'd
rather just be adopted because my parents are not in a position to care for me you know they just don't have the ability to make that happen and so it's you know social workers and it's the system it's you know everyone involved in the foster care bureaucracy um making a series of decisions and often the people who make decisions are kind of far removed from what's happening on the ground in these homes um and so yeah I
mean if anything things might things might actually be worse now than they were when I was going through in the late 90s I hope they're not but I've heard you know like the number of PE number of kids entering care is
skyrocketing um you know especially in the wake of the opioid crisis and just the it's easier now than it was um you know what 25 or 30 years ago to access drugs and all these kinds of things and so you know a lot of kids are are being
neglected and that's usually the main reason I mean I think wonder you know why do kids enter care and usually the the number one reason is is neglect more so than active abuse um you know most parents do care about their kids you know they don't actively want to harm them but it's more so maybe they're you know their their reward centers of their brain get hijacked by drugs or they're suffering from Mental Illness but often
the mental illness is um uh triggered by uh use of substances and so yeah the kid just sort of finds themselves in a I mean that was like the usual story I remember talking to my foster siblings about this about you know why are you here what happened usually yeah my mom got into trouble or my dad got arrested and it wasn't like they were hurting the kid it was more just they they were distracted by other things and so then you know teacher or a
neighbor or someone called the police and you know they entered the system in that way another view that I think people might be surprised by is you know you mentioned that you're Korean and uh and Latin uh but Charles Murray wrote a book called coming apart the uh state of White America 1960 through 2010 and if anything uh things have gotten worse since he since he wrote that book and so it seems to me that this is this is a
like a racial thing at all this is like this affects every color every race and and there's kind of a universal finding that um a lot of this really needs a incredibly significant over overhaul do do you see that as being even a
possibility yeah well I mean so yeah you're yeah the point is right that um I mean we're so in the Foster HS I grew up in it was like you know most of my foster parents were so this was Los Angeles so it was you know a lot of sort
of uh uh Hispanic or or Filipino families that were taking us in and then um yeah my foster siblings a lot of them were Hispanic or or black and some white kids you know handful of Asian kids but um like like mostly um uh Southeast Asian or South asan but like it was but but when I got to Red Bluff Red Bluff is Way North it's like two hours north of Sacramento it's a part of California very few people visitor even know about
and it's much more rural um much more Blue Collar area and it was I mean when I was growing up it was probably like maybe 65 35 or 7030 white to Hispanic um and yeah I mean it was was yeah it was not like a racial because you saw like like the the middle class Hispanic families were intact and they were fine but it was the sort of the more workingclass ones that were having difficulty and same with the white families too but it was like mostly
workingclass families there and so the the picture I described earlier of my friends um you know I had white friends and I had Mexican friends and it was like it wasn't that you know it was kind of very similar across across ethnic
backgrounds um and so uh yeah is there way to to address it I mean it's I think it would take a lot of I mean it would take a sort of complete transformation in terms of sort of what we're building to talk about uh as far as family and
importance for kids and you know there's a lot of discussion of poverty and inequality but a point that I make in the book is that I mean one of the findings that I found interesting um that I cite there is that uh the correlation between um childhood family income and and detrimental outcomes in adulthood uh things like substance abuse or or likelihood of of incarceration or you know committing committing crimes and acts of violence
or self-defeating behaviors uh drinking and driving those kinds of things the link between childhood poverty and those outcomes later in life I mean it's very tenuous um it's kind of inconsistent some findings show no significance whatsoever others show a very low correlation um however when researchers look at uh childhood instability and those detrimental outcomes later in life they find a strong and consistent effect
um across across different studies um so this is a replicated finding uh and so childhood instability is measured by things like um frequency of relocation as a child how many homes did you move into how many people moved in and out of
the home that you uh the homes that you lived in so um you know did you have people sort of coming in and out uh throughout your life uh were your parents together were they divorced were they separated um how frequently Did you
sort of go back and forth if they were divorced so just sort of day-to-day disorder and instability um especially you mentioned earlier the sort of first five to seven years of life uh are critical that developmental window um and so when researchers just look at instability during the first five to seven years of life the effect is the strongest but it still remains significant even if you just sort of measure throughout the entire uh
person's upbringing from you know age from birth to age 18 and so you know a point that I make is that you know yes we can address issues of poverty and material um lack but I also think we could be focusing on instability and trying to cultivate security for young kids too especially during those first five to seven years to make sure that the kid feels uh you know what did you mention these scripts right to feel like
uh you know uh they're not a loser or that they're not going to um engage in self-defeating behaviors like that they're worthy of success um and I cite research from from the Nobel laurate James Heckman who's done research on uh comparing the US and Denmark in terms of social mobility and he finds basically the rates of social mobility in Denmark are roughly the same uh and despite the fact that in Denmark University education is free uh and a
lot of the sort of social welfare programs are easily accessible and more generous than they are in the US um but the social Mobility rates for poor and working class kids in Denmark uh are indistinguishable from those in the US and he points out that the family system for poor and working-class people in Denmark are identical almost to the US in terms of rates of single Parenthood and and kids living in instability and
squalor um and so if you have those very difficult early life experiences you know you don't just magically turn 18 and someone says hey here's free tuition and go to university and your life's going to change if you spent the first 18 years of your life sort of struggling and not forming good relationships with your family with your friends with people who want the best for you um you know you're not going to turn it all
around just because you're suddenly an adult um and yeah that's that's you know something that I that I discuss at length too uh is you know my friends when we all graduated high school a good number of them decided to go to Community College and you know they're like oh I'm just going to go to Community College I'll transfer to a fouryear university and you know it's going to be great and actually they're they're performing in Community College
was worse than it was in high school and the reason is not that difficult to understand which is that when we were all in high school we actually had a little bit of oversight we had Parents you know they weren't always the most involved but they were around and they would sort of you know make sure that we weren't completely you know going going off the rails um but once you're 18 it's like all bets are off it's like you know
if I want to skip class and just drink all day and get high in the parking lot and go play video games or get into trouble um no one can tell you that you can't do those things and so you know I have friends who are still to this day
like 33 years old still in Community College because they're just you know they just can't quite get everything together so I I still haven't quite figured out how you can spend 15 years in community college but I have friends
who you know like I don't know if you ever see that movie Van Wilder Jim but you know they're they're taking that to an extreme where they want to be in college forever um and so yeah it's uh anyway yeah so basically yeah point being very extreme early life instability and all those things I mean it becomes hard later at at the other side of age8 to achieve upward Mobility or those conventional um metrics of success yeah and you're mentioning of
the uh study between uh Denmark and the US and social Mobility is one that I've seen and so obviously in your book when I was reading the manuscript I was very interested in that and you you know it kind of makes uh Murray makes the same case in his book essentially uh the reason he started in 1960 was it was before all of the big social changes in America and and he pointed out uh I think pretty convincingly that uh the
experience uh was not one of your socioeconomic class it was of what kind of households you grew up at and and at the beginning of the book he points out that in 1960 like if you were poor you were growing up in a two parent household and uh you know the outcomes were far more similar back then um and then and then he zeros in on single Parenthood and and that as one of the culprits and I I know that that you addressed that as
well yeah he he writes that uh and and I mean what's interesting about Murray's book is that he looks specifically at white Americans right like he looks at non-hispanic us whites and he's fighting you know all of the kind of social
pathologies related to to income to class to that divide yeah that that in 1960 95% of us children regardless of their social class were raised by both of their birth parents and by 2005 um for uh affluent kind of upper
middle class upper class Americans it had dipped slightly to 85% but it's still the vast majority of affluent uh kids born into families raised by both birth parents but for workingclass kids um you know kids who with with with parents who maybe work blue College jobs who didn't go to university didn't go to college it dropped to 30% um and even that kind of struck me as as high I mean so that was 2005 but yeah I mean I grew
up I mean I was a kid in 2005 I remember that era and it still seemed more than I would have expected um because yeah it was just an anomaly where I grew up uh to see anyone raised by both of their birth parents and so yeah this I mean
obviously economics must play some non-zero non-trivial role here but there's something else going on with values with where our priorities are with you know what what people think of as a good life as as far as cultural
guard rails um I mean a point that I've made a little bit in the book and then in my substack and other other pieces is that you know if you are if you're just a conscientious AC academically oriented kind of Forward Thinking person you don't need that much in the way of um social values or Norms or pressure you don't need much Social pre you can sort of figure out on your own you know what's a good way to live life you know
what's the best sort of formation for my children what do I want for my future you can kind of you know inch your way forward to living the kind of life that can lead to to FL you know a flourishing outcome especially when you're around
people who are the same way right like if you're raised by parents and people around you who also have um those practices who adhere to those practices but if you you know are less conscientious and less academically
oriented and you're around people who maybe aren't the best influence and you just have all these forces working against you becomes that much harder unless you have someone around you who's willing to you know if you have you know
sort of people around you to to be good Role Models good parents good uh neighbors those kinds of things I mean even something as simple as relationships I mean I remember like I put a little bit of this in the book but
I think I would probably get cancelled if I really um documented in detail how teenage boys talked about girls uh in a place where like we didn't have any dads around we didn't have any older male role models saying like here's what a good marriage looks like and here's how you should treat women and here's what you should be prioritizing and you know when it's just like like if you get a bunch of 15-year-old boys together with
no Role Models or male father figure around you know we're just going to get our cues from pop culture or music or TV or just our own dumb brain and you know that becomes the model for how we treat girls and women and it's really not you know it's not it's not good um and so you can you know you could you could uh extrapolate from that across like everything you know jobs work education everything if we don't have good good
role models in place so yeah it's um I think it's it's as much of a cultural issue as it is an economic one yeah I think uh the the reason that the Murray book coming apart is interesting is he he realized that he [ __ ] up with the bell curve uh by one one chapter on race and and it's so easy I I always try to say like imagine how ridiculous it is if if we discriminated against everyone who had blue eyes as opposed to brown eyes
or green eyes and and yet the the whole racial identity and and uh the various uh identitarian politics um I I thought he did a great job by Focus you know what we're not gonna look at anyone else except white
Americans guess what they're all [ __ ] up too and so this has nothing to do with race uh this has nothing to do with in in a fairly material way as you yourself found in your own book The the idea that it wasn't necessarily the socioeconomic
class but it was the stability of the family unit in which uh the child was uh I I still remember I was re looking at the the manuscript and like some of the statistics are just wild like you you could take two kids one and they they grew up in the same kind of economic class but one kid was in in foster care and one kid had was growing up with his parents and as you point out in your book The the outcomes are really really
different and that replicates too right yeah yeah oh yeah you see this consistently I mean there yeah there's a there's a sort of slew statistics at the beginning and the end of the book I mean I I sort of you know approached this book you know well it was I mean it took it took a while actually to sort of take the shape that it did but we sort of settled on the the preface would contain a lot of the academic work research
survey data all these kinds of things and then the final few chapters also contain some of that information but most of the the bulk of the book is about my firsthand experiences um but yeah I mean one one interesting statistic was that know so
across the US overall about 35 I think the most recent data showed 38% of us adults 25 and old uh have a bachelor's degree or above so you know 35 38% graduated from college um overall and then when you break it
down by um by income uh only 11% of kids in the bottom income quintile graduate from college uh so what 35% overall only 11% for kids who grow up in poor families uh but then when you look at the data for foster kids it's only 3% um some have shown less than 3% but we'll say 3% um so what this means in simple terms is that if you grow up poor in America you're four times more likely to graduate from college than if you spend
time in foster care um and there's some other research from Amir SAR oan at Oxford him and his co-authors have found that um so they they analyzed data this was from Finland and what they found was that within the same family so it's the
same family but in some cases for whatever reason one of the siblings in the family was placed into foster care into out of out of Home Care uh and other siblings weren't and this could have been through you know different
periods of of uh the the parents' lives something along those lines but basically what they found was that siblings who were placed in out of Home Care were two to three times more likely than their siblings who were not placed in out of Home Care to become poor to become addicted to substances to be arrested to be convicted of crimes like all sorts of detrimental outcomes um and the researchers uh posited you know they
they they hypothesized that the reason for this was likely due to that sort of extreme instability early in life which matches up with those earlier um findings that I had mentioned before about the outsized role of childhood
inst stability uh on a on a kid's life and so yeah I mean it's it's uh you know and so most kids you know thankfully aren't in foster care in America uh but I would say that if you were to just take the sort of mode childhood the most
typical childhood in the US today um it probably looks closer to what foster care looks like than say you know whatever decades ago when you know the 1960s say like when when Murray wrote the book um so it's not the same as foster care but it's probably closer to that sort of instability of um different siblings step siblings I had one friend um I lived with him and his brother my senior year of high school uh so I moved
out basically when I was 16 moved in with my my friend uh and his dad and his brother and his dad had been married and divorced five times throughout their childhood that's five different St the Triumph of Hope over experience right
that's exact yeah and um and I remember talking to my friend about this like so the reason I was able to move in with them was because they had a spare bedroom open because the most recent step family the stepmom and her kids
from her previous marriage had moved out and so there was a bedroom available for me where their step brother had formerly lived um and I'm talking to them about this and they were like yeah we just had like a whirlwind of families growing up like we had our dad here the whole time he was the kind of steady presence but it was like every two or three years it was another stepmom and another step sibling and you know it's just a
whirlwind like this and I was like yeah you know it's it's not the same but it's kind of similar to like the Foster system right just people coming and going at all you know at all uh random times throughout your childhood um and
so yeah this yeah this this kind of instability is um yeah does it does play a role and so people will say you know is it um you know how do we fix this how do we repair this I mean I think that you know there there probably
different ways to approach it I do think that one one way is to just be more honest about it one thing that I um you I had this very interesting experience recently Jim where um it sort of brought home for me the importance of communicating ideas and how ideas in addition to economic factors cultural factors ideas these matter too which is in the last about three or four months two different readers I've I've met with
two different readers um one of and basically both of them told me the same story where they told me that yeah they were they're married they have young children and they were having some difficulties in their marriage there was
no abuse or mistreatment or anything like that but they were just kind of getting bored and they thought oh maybe this thing's run its course they were having you know they were having second thoughts but they were also concerned
because they had young children and about the possible effect that a divorce might have so they were kind of on the fence about what to do um and they told me yeah we read something that you wrote on your substack or maybe something I tweeted basically you know we've been sort of following your work and uh decided um to work on uh our marriage and so you know one person was telling me how they had enrolled in uh Coupes
counseling and the others you know they're just sort of communicating more with each other and you know they're trying to make it work and this is just purely the result of consuming an idea right like no one gave them a paycheck
no one said like hey you know if you stay married we're going to give you more money this wasn't a material incentive this was purely just whatever scrolling their phone and looking at their substack app and then suddenly
this changed their life I think that when people are on the fence and they're about to make a life-changing decision the messages they receive from people they respect if whether it's podcast host or a writer or a thinker or just
someone who I guess yeah just works in the realm of ideas and has thought about these things in a in a maybe a deeper way than they had considered that can actually change people's decisions I mean it worked for me I mean I talked
about this in my book too that you know despite growing up in the circumstances I did you know the the ideas that I encountered and the people that I met they you know a lot of them did have sort of positive uh effects in my life that's a great segue because one of the things that helped you uh was joining the military um because it gave you and specifically the Air Force in your case um and one of the things you say is that
it gave you a structure and kind of a family that you know you had been lacking for the first uh part of your life talk a little bit about that and and and how did you make that decision how did you did was that something you
that was deeply considered or or you just lucky I mean more more luck it wasn't um yeah so I I enlisted ran out of high school I was 17 um I even had to have my My adoptive mom she had to sign a form for me to enlist because I was
underage um I sign I had I'd forged my mom's signature a bunch of times by that point already for report cards for permission slips for all kinds of things I got pretty good at forging her signature um and I thought about actually doing that to enlist but you know I I think I wanted her to know that I was doing it I wanted I wanted her not it's not her permission her approval um because I did care what she thought and
you know it was important to me that she supported the decision but anyway so so yeah my senior year of high school I you know by by that point I I worked two different jobs I was working at a restaurant as a dishwasher and a bus boy and then I got
a job as a bad boy at a grocery store and in both of those jobs um you know I I looked at my co-workers and a lot of them were guys in their early to mid 20s some in their 30s and they were just like not living great
lives at least not lives that I aspired to I mean just the you know I guess it's kind of cool when you're 17 to you know smoke weed in your car and you know just whatever have fun and go to parties and drink Rank and live that kind of life but when you're 25 or 28 or 31 and you're still doing those things especially like you know there was even even when I was a teenager I did think there was something you know weird about
like how my my older co-workers would be like willing to buy beer for me and my friends I was like you know that's weird that like I don't know like you'd see like the weird old guy at the at the high school party and I saw that I'm like I don't want to be like that like yeah so but I didn't know what else I was going to do I mean I wasn't in a position to go to college I kind of knew that if I did the Community College
route that my friends were talking about like there was just no way it was going to work for me um I also didn't really have anywhere to live I mean you know my mom and her partner you know they' separated there was like drama at home like I didn't really have anywhere else to go um and so there were two different um older uh males you know guys I respected um so one was my friend's father who I mentioned before I lived with him uh my
senior year of high school and he had been in the military uh and he recommended it to me and one of my history teachers was in the Air Force and he recommended it to me and so you know these these two older male figures who I respected quite a bit like my history teacher one thing I liked about him is that he like once once he accepted that I was a slacker and that I wasn't going to do the work he would just talk to me like he was like and
you're kind of a wayward kid you're not doing your homework you like you sleep through class you're kind of a you know whatever like you're just clearly you're not going to put in the effort but he would talk to me and he could like he
could tell I was smart like a lot of a lot that's the other thing is like people say we need more funding for teachers or we need more support or something like maybe those things are true but teachers are usually pretty
good at detecting who's smart and who's dumb and and who has academic promise and who doesn't um but just because they encourage you or notice it in you doesn't mean the kids actually going to act on their abilities or aptitudes like teachers would quite frequently tell me like you're a smart kid like what are you doing like why don't you just like I would read the textbooks like I would know what they were talking about I
could keep up with the class but I just the idea of doing homework or or turning in science projects any of that stuff it just was not interesting to me and I was also you know I had a chip on my shoulder I was an Angry Kid too um
probably because the you know all those experiences that I'd mentioned but you so anyway this history teacher was like look you're not you know you're not going to go to college um the military might be a good thing for you he showed
me a picture on his computer of him in his flight suit and I was like that looks pretty cool um and so you know between those those two uh people giving me good advice I ended up enlisting and uh yeah I just just left um the summer
after I graduated I was the youngest guy in my unit in basic training and yeah it was uh it was probably the best decision I ever made honestly because it immediately got me out of the environment I was in and into a much
more structured one especially the first year couple of years of of a military enlistment you know when you're a low man on the totem pole it's like every single aspect of your existence is tightly regulated and controlled you know from how you wear your uniform to how your boots look to how you make your bed your you know the cleanliness of your living space every you know how you march like literally everything how you
fold your clothes and it's mind-numbing and it's dull and I remember I sort of glossed over it in the book like I described it I described like a day in the life but like if I went through the dayto day details you know the reader would fall asleep but I was like here's basically what it's like and and then and then you just multiply this by I was in for eight years Jim you know it's funny I talked to um the other day and I
know that you're you're friends with her too Paulina pomon and um and she was like telling me Rob when I read your book and read like what you were like when you were a teenager and I talk to you now like it's like two different people like I can't even picture you being like that and what I told her was like I was in the Air Force for eight years like that's a that's a long time yes and and they were they were formative years from 17 to 25 right
like my early adult years were in this extremely rigid environment that sort of drilled good habits into me that taught me you know basically how to be a responsible person um like even though especially the first couple of years I actually hated it um you know there there was more than one occasion where I thought I made a mistake because it was just so overwhelming like suffocating how little freedom I had um in that
environment that I was like man I just want to go back and drink beer with my friends and play Xbox and get into trouble go go you know race on the freeway or something but this is just you know this is awful um um but then in
hindsight of course I was like you know best decision I ever made you know and uh one of the things that I learned when I was in the Air Force was this distinction between self-discipline and motivation uh and what I learned is that
know a lot of people will say they need to feel motivated to do something uh or you know I I don't do that because I don't feel motivated or I lacked motivation so I'm not going to do it what the military taught me was like you know motivation is just a feeling you know discipline is I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel like whatever's going on up here inside you that's meaningless what actually matters is the
action you take you know a simple example would be like going to the gym I don't feel like going to the gym but that doesn't matter what actually matters is like did you put your shoes on and did you go inside the gym um and
in the real world that's what matters and so initially the discipline was imposed top down right like it didn't matter if I was motivated or if I wanted to do something the instructor was really like you're going to do this or
we're going to court Marshal you and you go to military prison like those are your options and then later it was like the discipline had been drilled into me and so I had it inside internally and it was like I need to do these things because you know that's more important than not doing it and regardless of how I feel if I just act on this thing you know you multiply that over the course of a few days or a few months and good
things start to happen and so yeah the the discipline was important and then finally I would say that the um you know there's also this you know now I'm speaking more as a as a psychologist it would be um just the
sort of maturity in the development over time uh I cite research about the young male syndrome uh in the book which is basically this fighting from psychologists and criminologists uh that indicates that basically the people in any society
regardless of time place culture you know you can look at Japan you can look at at the US you can look anywhere in the world um and you'll find that the people who are the most likely to commit crimes are young men uh in their late teens and early 20s uh and so researchers call this the young male syndrome because that group is the most likely to take extreme risks to commit crimes to get involved in violent altercations to drink and drive to
basically engage in full hearty behaviors but what the military did was basically um remove the ability to do dumb things I mean you can do them but they make very clear that these are the consequences and you know it's it's just
it's it first it's hard to act on on your impulses in the first place and then you know that if you do do those things that the consequences will be Swift and severe um whereas in the real world um you know outside of that
environment if you're 18 years old and you're reckless and impulsive I mean you can drink and drive a lot before it catches up with you um you can get into a lot of fights or take a lot of drugs or sleep with a lot of strangers before
the consequences of pregnancy or addiction or all those things eventually catch up to you but in the military there's just you know do X and Y will happen and so you know it allowed me basically to mature out of the young
male syndrome years so that by the time I was in my early 20s um you know even if I didn't learn anything about self-discipline or camaraderie or Focus or any the things that I um that it equipped me with you know it's still a few years that I just spent not getting into trouble and allowing myself to sort of develop mentally and you know the frontal loopes develop and you become a little bit wiser and a little bit less
um reckless in your behaviors you you know the average guy at age you know 22 or 24 is going to be less Reckless than at age 18 or 19 um which is one of the reasons why you know the military is set up the way that it is I mean it's really
interesting when I when I think back to the um like the regulations where essentially you're on base you have to live on base so this is the Air Force I think the other branches have different requirements and rules
but the Air Force basically for the first three years sometimes in some cases the first four years you have to live on base before they let you move off I was a I was a weird case because I I joined when I was very young and then I got promoted very fast so I actually moved out when I was 19 which was I mean I I got very lucky because when I was 19 I was I was drinking and drive and doing all those things you know I talk about
how oh you know but like I was still finding ways to bend the rules um just less less uh you know I was behaving less EX in in a less extreme way than I otherwise would have had I not been in that environment I was dumb but I was I guess like strategic about how dumb I was because I knew like how far I could push things and what I could get away with um but generally you can't move off till you're 21 22 years old which is
like roughly the age that people graduate from college right so they kind of have this like same um Outlook as far as when you're mature enough to do certain things 18 to 22 you're basically an undeveloped [ __ ] and so we have to look at you the whole time it's almost like you're living in a dorm room on campus you can't do anything without someone else knowing about it but then once you're 2122 you're probably a little bit less you
know idiotic and so now we're going to let you move off face and be a little bit more of a an adult and so anyway so yeah those were those were some of the the the highlights I guess of the military experience the uh interest concept about the young male syndrome I've seen a lot of research that links that to the that's when males typically at the highest testosterone in their in their system and i' so I've seen a lot of arguments
made um for for a an actual chemical uh cause contributing to that and and you know uh I I've spent time in Africa and uh it happens across the animal class too uh the African call young male elephants naughty boys because they
engage in all of the types of behavior that you just described um if you get mock charged by an elephant it is almost always a naughty boy adolescent male um and uh so uh I think that the the idea of the structure of the military
certainly makes sense right because as you say like the consequences for you were very severe if if you did any of those crazy things C can you can you imagine an alternate world and what do you think would have happened to Rob who didn't enlist I mean basically any of the outcomes that I mentioned for my friends like those all seem plausible um you know I I think I mentioned this before that when I was a kid teenage teenag or
two I mean I did have a chip on my shoulder I had something to prove I you know like you know you mentioned you testosterone's at its peak but it was like this weird blend of you know I was you know I was lifting weights I was
playing sports and I was like in pretty good shape but I still had this like fear in the back of my mind that people would think of me as weak and so I was ready to fight I mean I write about I don't know seven or eight fist fights in
the book but there were more I mean those were just a few um and so I mean it could have been anything um yeah another friend of mine recently was like yeah I'm reading one of these fights in your book and it's like you
know like you did get very lucky cuz like there was one you know I read about a couple occasions where I was getting kicked in the face when I was laying on the ground and like that is like very dangerous but it was just you know I was
young and like lucky and for whatever reason those things you know I didn't really get any severe injuries I mean like I punched someone and broke a finger and like little things like that but I never had like really severe like head injuries or anything um what could have happened I mean I mean I guess like the most likely outcome probably would have been yeah enrolling in a community college probably never graduating let me stop
you there because another thing that I've I've spoken to people about the book um and and they they follow you and are familiar with your your ideas I what what do you think about the idea that what this really is is just all queuing off of G general intelligence you're obviously very smart guy and um what would you say to the the idea that yeah Rob and it was the reason I asked you that question by the way uh be
because um as I've been thinking about it and getting ready to chat with you about this I myself just sort of speculated on huh I I wonder how much if we were going to use aam's razor here I wonder how much of this just ties back to your general intelligence what do you think so I I yeah I mean I understand that and I've and yeah I've heard people make similar suggestions but what I hope you know I I don't directly say this anywhere in the
book but I do think like you know maybe it's clear that sort of raw ability is necessary but not sufficient um you can be a very smart person but if you're in that kind like I didn't even think of myself as smart like when you're never around other people who are smart like like academically you know academically inclined you know none of my friends were that way none of the people I was around it was you know it wasn't really
until I got into the military that I started to meet people who were curious about things and who read books and who would have these more abstract intellectual kinds of conversations but where I was it wasn't like that and you
know and and I made this point too about how yeah I was was smart and I kind of knew I was smart too on some level um but I was still not I was still very unfocused in school uh extremely undisciplined um you know I was ditching
class I just didn't have the oversight right like you could have a very smart kid but if they don't have people around them or forces around them sort of channeling that aptitude in a productive Direction the way that I had in the military um you know like even things like because you have to take tests to study for promotion in the military and like I had supervisors and people around me who were like hey how's the studying
going like hey the staff sergeant test is coming up soon like you know here's you know did you get your textbook did you get your thing did you get the study guide I didn't have anything like that when I was a kid and honestly even if I had I don't know that I would have acted on it um and so oh yeah I'll just say that like you know a point that I make in my book is that my friends no matter what upbringing they had um you know you can
give them the best case scenario as far as childhoods they were probably never going to go to a place like Yale that's just the reality but one of them didn't have to get shot to death and the other two didn't have to go to prison I
speculate that if they had had different early lives if they'd had different adults and different norms and different values and you know sort of been raised in a different kind of situation um their outcomes while you
know it may not have been astounding academic success they wouldn't have ended up in like you know prison or dead um and so for someone like me yes like the ceiling was going to a really great college and living that kind of life but the other options were still on the table given my environment and given the people that I was um around and the priorities that I had and the the feelings I had toward myself is something else that I address
in the book too was like do I deserve success like you know if you're repeatedly raised by people around you who don't treat you very well or who don't necessarily have your best interest in mind or if who just you know maybe
they're maybe they're kind to you in some way but they're you know their actions fall short um you eventually sort of pick up a certain Outlook about yourself and what you know what what um you know whether you deserve success
or not and that was something that I wrestled with early on too uh and that was the other thing that the military was great at was like we don't even care if you deserve success you just have to do it like you know whether you want to be like it doesn't matter what you want or how you feel about yourself was like you have a mission to do here are the things you need to do and just [ __ ] do it like you know and so well you know
so was if I didn't have that right like Jim if I didn't have those things I I would I don't go to Yale like 100% guaranteed if I hadn't been in the military I never would have wed up there just because I would have picked up the habits the study habits the discipline plan the you know the ability to stay out of trouble for long enough and stay alive long enough for me to actually for that to actually be a realistic goal by
the time I'm 24 or 25 years old maybe I would have gone to college you know maybe I would have gone to Sacramento State or you know those it's possible no you know but but I still I don't think it was likely um yeah in terms of My outcome it's it's it's anomalous even for someone with my G and everything yeah yeah the but the the other interesting thing is it gets really hard to dis angle because some of the behaviors that you mentioned you know
the laziness the the um not doing assignments not studying there is a high correlation with high intelligence people who are very highly intelligent tend to even if they're growing up in a family with Mom and Dad and Mom and Dad are saying go for it son or daughter they they do tend to as a matter of fact um I don't have a source to site uh but I read long ago that uh police departments used to limit the IQ of uh people that they hired um and
there was a maximum right you know how the military there's a minimum uh because you literally can't train somebody to do the appropriate procedures that are like you know life uh threatening if you can't do it right um but I the the police department and this was the United States it wasn't just one Police Department uh had a had a maximum IQ and that the reason that was given was because people who say gifted IQs do not follow orders well
they do not follow procedures well they they they chafe at no you got to do this by the book they're like [ __ ] you I gotta do it by the book you you want me to find the criminal I could do it but this is how I'm going to do it and it's completely outside of the Norms of the pleas part so so Jim that remind this is a story I haven't told anyone I like you know it's so funny like in the process of writing the book so many old memories
came to mind and I would like bolt awake at 3:00 a.m like oh that I need to write that down before I forget so so a couple of points on the on the IQ and the testing thing so first and and this is something i' I've explained before was
that I'm I'm a strong advocate of standardized testing at the moment I'm working on a piece for the Boston Globe you know maybe by the time this episode's published the piece will be out basically defending the importance
of the SAT and I testing for a variety of reasons I mean one is that um you know for me it was like the first like hard evidence that I had as a kid that I was uh a pretty smart guy um so again like my grades were terrible but when I took the asbab uh which is a military standardized test the armed services vocational aptitude battery um which is I mean it highly correlates with IQ it strongly correlates with the SAT um and
it measures a lot of the same skills it measures like basic literacy arithmetic mathematics all those kinds of things um they took this test my senior year of high school and I remember later going through the results with the recruiter and he pulled up some charts basically uh showing me that you could convert um asbab results into SAT scores and he showed me the score and I realized it was the same as one of my classmates who
was going to college like you know my class was straight A student smart it was recognized in the school as one of the smartest kids and I was like wow I got the same score as that guy um by that point it was too late like you know I was about to graduate high school horrible GPA but that was the first dling I had that like oh this is like evidence that I actually could have gone to college if I wanted later I did take
the SAT and you know I was applying to to colleges but you know the point there was like you know basically I think like more kids should take the SAT you know people were trying to dismantle it and eliminate it and all these things but
there was this a researcher yeah the study out of out of out of Chicago um which basically they uh administered uh an IQ test to all of the kids in this school district um and what they found was like basically this
increased the number of non-white minority and poor kids into the gifted programs so basically usually gifted programs work by recommendation from teachers or parents uh and so it's purely subjective evaluation and so these researchers administered an IQ test to every kid and basically like a lot of these kids were being overlooked they deserved this gifted status but because parents are maybe parents are even unaware that the gifted program
exists if they're kind of low income or not really that involved in the school system or don't really know what's going on and maybe they don't have whatever the time or the availability to monitor that their kid might actually be you know extremely smart but the test can reveal those things um the other thing is so I remember I remember uh so right after basic training I went to tech school every everyone goes to this you
know they go to Tech school they get they receive training for their specific occupation um and I remember I think it was the first test or the second test this was like you know I went through basic training but I was still 17 and unfocused and I think I didn't I didn't study for one of the tests and I I was like treating it like high school like I'm gonna wing this and see what happens but it was actually a hard test um it
was the the course was called electronic principles and it was like ACDC circuitry and all this kinds of stuff and I was like you know I didn't understand the diagram I was like you have to study this to know you know you can't just [ __ ] your way through it I think I I failed the first or second test just winging it didn't study the the guy they gave us a booklet I didn't look at it and I failed it and I remember um there was another guy who
failed it and they immediately put him into I mean this is really funny and like anyone who's in the military who listens to this will laugh because they put him into Finance the finance occupation so he washed out he washed out of uh the electronic principles course and they put him into the finance thing which basically he handles people's paychecks and the reason I think you know people are going to laugh is because anyone who's in the
military who's ever had to deal with Finance or paycheck related issues or payments or or um basic uh uh allowances for housing or or anything like just dealing with the finance uh Center on the military is always a nightmare and
maybe because they put guys who can't pass EP so so they put him in but then I remember they pulled me aside uh like the I can't remember the the title of the person who like led the course he was like the the the lead instructor
pulled me into his office and he was like I looked at your as web score and I looked at your you know basic training and I looked at every he looked at your record and he was like why are you failing this like very Elementary course he's like are you studying or you like he basically grilled me and then he at the end of it he was like you better [ __ ] study like you can't you know you and um and I I did and I passed and
everything but I just found it like would you just say said about um the military and IQ and like people being unfocused because they're too smart this kind of thing it REM me think like we because I remember like why did they put
me in the finance thing like why am I getting yelled at and being pressured to pass this course when this other guy they just washed him out and put him somewhere else and I think it's because of this logic you're you're you're
pointing out here where they're like okay if you're you know if if you have different levels of ability the military knows right like you can pass this course you're just lazy and this other kid they're like maybe you can't pass this course maybe you just barely met the threshold for this occupational category and you failed very badly and we're not going to you know waste the resources and the time and the energy to put you through
remedial training so we're just going to put you into this easier job I'm pretty sure that's what happened you know through through this conversation and that goes across all all sorts of people I myself uh when I was younger unfortunately my oldest sister died and one of the things that happened to me I was 10 when she died uh was that I started acting out um and you know shoplifting and uh just not being a great kid and so my parents
moved me to uh the seventh grade of a newly introduced milit uh uh Middle School at a military school um really kind of a prep school to be honest you know we still wore uniforms and everything but uh the military was not
as as emphasized as like when my dad went there it's called St Thomas Academy when my dad went there it was called St Thomas Military Academy and at age 18 you could graduate um now this is back in the 1940s but at age 18 you could
graduate into being a second Louie in the Army um so it was serious um anyway they moved me there as a discipline problem for those not watching I'm doing Eric books but I'm doing shouldn't because I really was a discipline problem and so anyway I was very unhappy about it and I got all D minuses um my my first uh quarter there or first semester there and so they gave me I still remember vividly they gave me to the guidance
counselor for the high school whose name was father dolin it was a Catholic school and he gave me a series of tests which I later learned were IQ tests and uh he I he brought me in afterwards and he's like he had a very odd way of speaking he would keep his hands together and he'd say James we know something about you that you probably don't know and I'm like what that fathered doing and he he said well I'm not going to tell you exactly
but I'm changing all of your class assignments and so what they did was they put me in all of the what at the time were called speed classes which would be AP classes today and and in other words kind of the same experience like I did well on those tests and and my math professor who' recommended i' be you know looked at by the guidance counselor was the one who originally caught it um and it was essentially he called me in and he's like you know
something that's funny Jim and I went what's that and he goes you managed to get a D minus in every course that you're taking I went yeah I'm dumb and he goes how do you manage to know exactly how you're GNA pass a test with
a D minus and not an f and I'm like and he just looked at me I I was like oh but but I I definitely I definitely hear it in you too though you had you had people care about you you had you had that guy who pulled you aside and
he's like come on up man what's going on and and I had that too um and I wonder you know that's got to be important too but I I want to leave this topic because I wanna I want to get to you well just just on on this point very quickly I mean one of the things you because people talk about intellig we talked about it already but that's an important piece it's it's an ingredient and it it's it's a critical one if you
if you lack it you're not going to you know do academically you know you're not going to academically Excel uh if you completely you know if you're if you're in the bottom you know 10% or something but the other piece is the conscientiousness piece right and I actually do score I think I'm like the 80 80 something percentile in conscientiousness pretty high but one of the things that's come up repeatedly when I speak with personality
psychologists um I had this conversation um a while back with this guy Brent Roberts who's like one of the top personality psychologists in the world and he says that the big five they're useful but it doesn't capture motivation
um conscientiousness can be deployed when you want to do something but if the if the activity doesn't interest you then it's not going to express itself in that way um and there's an anecdote in this book Talent from Tyler Cowan and
Daniel gross um which you may have you may have encountered um which is uh you know they give this this anecdotal example which helps to illustrate which is um there's this guy vicam Seth who wrote a book called um a suitable boy which was like laed considered a masterpiece um but he was a PhD student in economics at Stanford and he dropped out to write that novel and is his explanation he basically said I wrote this book because
I didn't have enough conscientiousness to finish my PhD at Stanford right and this is like he's you know he's obviously conscientious person but he just wasn't motivated to finish the PHD but he was motivated to write this book
and so the effort and the willingness and all those things were there for one activity but not the other and I think I had a bit of that too that yes the whatever the G and the conscientiousness like those were in place but when I was
in high school I didn't have the motivation I didn't have the drive I didn't have the self-discipline right you know I made that distinction between motivation and self-discipline I didn't have any of those other forces working for me um the way that they were later so anyway yes let's uh you know Yale uh more more fun stuff before we get to Yale I I happen to agree with you vehemently on the uh idea of standardized test because of the reason
that what people AR well you're pointing it out but many aren't pointing it out it is the way that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds can get into those special classes and and trying to get rid of them you got to tie yourself in knots right if you if you're trying to say Well they're unfair no no no they're actually helping select more kids because that is a really object Ive uh rank so anyway I look forward to your
article now let's get to Y so um tell us about that tell us about kind of like the the the cultural uh shock that you uh my daughter graduated from Yale uh my dad went to Yale I was a legacy and could have gone to Yale uh but was a bit of a radical and and didn't do that uh but but but but talk us talk us through your your in ction d i I think it's fabulous yeah I mean so it's funny like there's a there's a sort of um uh bation
as far as what people's favorite chapters of the book are and I've noticed you know this is you know broad generalization of course but for early readers a lot of I've noticed like a lot of the um women tend to like the early
chapters you know there's a lot of emotion and a lot of POS and so on you know during my my childhood experiences but I notic a lot of guys especially younger guys they like the yell chapters you know they like that sort of crazy
college experience and um yeah I mean so I I got out of the military in August of 2015 I started classes at Yale I moved to New Haven started classes September and then in October I witnessed the birth of you know basically a new kind of social ideological movement you know this sort of resurgence of identity politics and these kinds of things but you know it was hard like the first the first few weeks at Yale you know I was trying to
fit in I was an older student you know I I had taken some night classes at a community college before you know I transferred some credits in but Community College is just different night class is Especial just any class with adults but now I'm like literally with 18 year olds and I'm 25 and like you know a joke that I made is I actually got younger as College went on because I I like shed more and more of like that military background and
mindset I just became more and more of a student um but it was was like really just the first few weeks were really difficult um the course work I mean this is the other thing is like yeah like the the raw the raw materials were there but like you know the the course load was way it was very intense um you know these schools especially the classes that aren't filled with you know dogmatic political stuff just your usual good
good courses by good professors they're still very hard the reading uh load the problem sets like it's still like difficult to get through if you're not focused and you don't have good study habits and discipline I lack those
things and so I remember that first semester I was really struggling until I started to talk to students and talk to people about like how to approach these study strategies i t I went to office hours and I was like you know like how
like what's the best way to like get through this reading list because you're assigning 800 Pages a week and I have four other classes like what am I supposed to do um and you know eventually I learned there are strategies and there are ways and like me you know methods to like basically condense the readings or or collaborate with other students and so you know I'll I'll read these 200 Pages you read those 200 and we'll just share the the
summaries the bullet points so we get the main ideas those kind of things or collaborate in other ways and so yeah um just as I felt like I was kind of easing into college life and kind of making friends and like you know kind of fumbling my way around um were you know we're heading into Halloween 2015 and the Yale Administration sends out this email to all of the students basically saying um you know be mindful
of the Halloween costumes you wear uh you know don't you know don't engage in cultural appropriation don't um I have a funny story about cultural appropriation we can get to later but don't engage in cultural appropriation don't you know
don't be offensive you know be be whatever be compassionate and respectful to fellow students okay so then uh this faculty member this uh Professor Erica Christus uh who was an associate they were still calling the
master she was an associate Master at one is one of the residential colleges her husband was the master she Nicholas who's also on the faculty she writes an email to the students just in her Residential College kind of in response to this Yale Administration email saying um you know do we really need the administration interfering in our lives um you know you're all adults you want to wear costumes you know and you find
them distasteful or offensive or what have you like communicate with each other um and she was basically defending freedom of expression and the encroachment of the University into the everyday lives of students and the
response was just incredible um you know students calling for her to be fired calling her you know telling she's defending culture appropriation she's a racist she's this that and the other uh you know there were some famous videos
of her husband you know basically like in the courtyard of the college defending his wife defending freedom of expression you know saying like you know I whatever like I I'm not going to apologize for you know the principles that she was upholding you know I'll apologize like I I didn't want anyone to feel hurt by this um but you know it was a weird thing in the first place to like have him apologize on behalf of his wife
I mean even asking for that was kind of I mean it's kind of a retrograde attitude you know the man gets to apologize for his wife um but I had a lot of difficulty even understanding what was offensive in the first place um I read the email from Erica probably four or five times and I was like this seems perfectly reasonable to me like I don't know like it like the other thing was like they're all just the same people to me was like the you
got the administration you got a professor you got it was like you're all just Yale people and like what's up like what's upsetting about this and I'm just like this this vet who just like arrived on campus trying to like decode this and
students would get mad at me I would ask like can you explain to me what was upsetting about this email or what was offensive and you know well some students you know they were just like you should be careful you shouldn't ask
that like you know just people will be offended by that and I didn't understand that other students got mad at me for even asking you know there was one one girl who said um you know I'm too privileged to understand the pain that Erica and her husband caused the students and that was like you know that that term privileged I mean you know now you know now I think you know basically she was you know judging me based on my
appearance essentially which is you know kind of kind of kind of ironic because I I think that ordinarily they would say you shouldn't do those things but she was making these inferences oh he's like kind of Asian looking guy you know he's
a cisgendered whatever like he's you know he's privileged um despite not really knowing anything about my background um and you know I kind of came to realize like that is the the campus you know it was a very popular
ideology on campus was to just sort of categorize people based on what you know what group they belong to and you know if if you're a member of this group or that group you're allowed to speak on certain things and if you're not then you're not allowed to speak but then there was a lot of ethesis as well placed on lived experience which seemed to contradict the idea that you know your social yeah your social category
membership dictates what you're allowed to speak about but then they would also say well your lived experiences would count and if you live through certain experiences then you're allowed to speak on certain things and so I would ask
like well what's more important your identity or what you actually went through in your life because you know according to you know some people on campus I guess you know I'm I'm privileged but then I also went through
a series of lived experiences that are very different from just about everyone on campus and you know people would get mad when I would ask this question and try to figure out like what did the eventually I just realized like a lot of it was not really thought through there seemed to be kind of two different types of people who supported this way of thinking I think one one group The probably the majority group their hearts
were in the right place they were trying to be compassionate they were trying to you know they they were just basically trying not to be jerks and if students appeared to be hurting or appeared to be upset just you know accept whatever they
want and fine move on and then I I you know gradually found that there was a probably you know probably maybe 10 to 20% of the students and and faculty and administrators on campus probably a larger percentage of the faculty and
administrators than the students who were more kind of mocky of Alan more calculating um who were like oh you know here's this you know new fangled ideology that I can use to basically get people I don't like fired or to get to silence students that I don't like and to basically Advance my agenda or my interests and you know I give a couple of examples in the book about how you know I'd see students talk about how oh
investment banks are emblems of capitalist oppression and hierarchy and all you know all these buzzwords and then you'd see the same students at a recruitment session for Golden Sachs and you know I think for those students what I you know what what I believe now is that they were basically trying to eliminate their Rivals right like if they could convince me oh you know investment banks are evil oh they're evil I'm not going to you know I'm not
going to apply for those jobs oh good you're not going to apply I'm going to go apply for this Goldman Sachs job and that's one less person because those you know those are very prestigious very competitive internships and I do think there was a bit of duplicity and a bit of sort of you know enaging and you know some Cloak and Dagger going on there that um you know was surprisingly prevalent and just the level of status
anxiety I didn't expect to see because when I first arrived I was like wow I'm at Yale like considering where I came from like you know no one ever goes to Yale then it's like oh and now he's homeless right like you're going to be
fine you're gonna you know like I felt like I won the lottery basically and in a way I did um but then I'm you know looking around on campus and meeting with students and talking people and it's like they they feel like it's
always the next thing it's like okay now you now I need to get this internship now I need to go to law school now I need to get this job now I need to make this much money and do this these impressive things and it was just constant hoop drop me non-stop um no one ever felt satisfied and um you know that was one of the you know one of the observations that contributed later to me developing the luxury beliefs idea was just the
that you know that that that that itch that all of these students seem to have about success and status and accomplishments and putting all of these very ambitious drivers in one one single location too I mean it just Amplified the competitiveness even more um granted not all students were I know I met I met good people I met good students good friends like people I'm still in touch with to this day but the general culture
on campus was just like you know the the message that we seemed to receive it was this double message of on the one hand you're all the Future Leaders of the world and you're all going to do great things and you're all so impressive and wonderful but then on the other hand especially in the wake of those campus controversies and protests it was also like you know you're so downtrodden and marginalized and oppressed and erased
and you know we didn't mean to you know offend you and we know how difficult your lives are and how hard things are and you feel unsafe and you feel traumatized blah blah I'm like so what is it like you know is this the future
ruling class are these like you know the the future whatever 1centers or are we just like a bunch of you know traumatized hurt you know sad people who are you know being bullied because this one Professor wrote you know basically a
normal email like so anyway you know it was just a very rocky rocky start but that was my introduction to the campus culture um and it wasn't just Yale you know this was 2015 2016 I was seeing similar kind of phenomena at other universities too um while I was at Yale I worked for this organization called service to school which was um basically geared toward partnering um veterans who were currently in college with uh uh people
who were applying hope you know ask you know applicants veterans who were trying to get so I was working with this guy um in the book I call him Daniel um and he was a former Marine he had a very difficult life you know arguably more
difficult than me I mean he was this this black dude who grew up in you know his mom was addicted to the crack and his dad I think it was in prison just like really tough early life and so you know he joined the Marines turned his
life around he and I worked together he ended up uh getting into Brown and you know he was like he was a marine right like he was very patriotic guy and when he arrived on campus in 2016 um he you on Veterans Day he did not expect to see a bunch of college students burning the American flag and you know he called me and he was like yo is this happening at Yale too like this is [ __ ] crazy and they weren't burning flags at Yale but you know like
veterans you know was like a there was a question mark over you know some people really liked vets others didn't but you you know as far as like celebrations for Veterans Day they would have like little you know little events and stuff but I'll just say that like if someone were to burn flags at Yale's campus it wouldn't be you know a shock I think Yale was a little bit brown brown has a reputation right yeah very much so yeah
Brown's got more of a reputation yeah more of a exactly and so you know I tried to talk him through this and I like yeah like he just you know I didn't you know it's I I don't know I didn't talk to him about the politics and all of this stuff that was happening CU I could tell he was he had the same kind of you know innocent hopeful aspirations about what college would be like the same ones that I did the year prior and yeah I didn't want to
burst his bubble and I'm like just telling him about the positive stuff just tell him about the positive stuff but so he was unprepared I was unprepared for it but like now everyone knows right like all of this stuff is
kind of Spilled Out of the University campuses and like everyone's everyone knows what's happening now but you know that you know what eight nine years ago uh it was still very much a sort of Campus phenomena I know Andrew Sullivan
wrote this you know it's famous post we all live on campus now but but in 2015 you know people on campus lived on campus and uh you know now now we're sort of seeing uh you know what happens when it sort of seeps throughout the culture one of the things that I was going to ask you is like especially in terms of luxury beliefs I'm wondering how much this is not so much an upper class versus lower class phenomenon but
rather a political division because there's lots of upper class people uh who don't share any of those luxury beliefs um nor do they signal uh them uh the way you point out uh you know a a classically leftist person might do that
um I think Maki avellan and competitiveness that that is across the political Spectrum right that it I always I'm always reminded of of Oliver Stone's uh 1987 movie Wall Street and of course if you know Oliver Stone you know
he's a very classic left-wing guy and uh actually was making the movie to you know indict Wall Street and indict the behavior and and dissuade young people from going uh into Wall Street and of course it turned out to be the greatest recruiting film Wall Street ever could have yeah and and and so um because you yourself you yourself are a if I was just going to be Devil's Advocate I would say rob you are a classic example of a meritocracy
actually working you know you you you got uh uh into Yale you got into Cambridge which for those who aren't familiar uh Oxbridge which is Oxford and Cambridge in the UK are the equivalents of our ivies they would argue that our ivies are the equivalent blood of Oxbridge but um any any any thoughts on that because like in in one way we could look at you as the poster boy of meritocracy and it working and then the other thing that I
want you to address is if do you find any irony at all that your your article on luxury beliefs appeared in the house organ for leftwing intellectuals the New York Times so the the luxury beliefs article I don't think I I the New York Times never ran so they they have published some of my essays before um but the luxury beliefs articles one was in the New York Post one was in quette and one was in the Wall Street Journal
so I guess you know it's you know the Wall Street Journal is is kind you know but I guess they're they're generally seen as being to the right of the New York Times but um but I mean like the general point you know I understand but
these days kind of PR does to the right of the New York Times [Laughter] fair enough you know um yeah it's um these I mean these are good questions you know so is is the luxury beliefs idea I mean is it more political than
than class I don't think so I mean you know the way that I Define luxury beliefs ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while inflicting costs on the lower classes um to a large extent it does overlap with political abuse but that's just because you know by the time I arrived on campus in 2015 there was this like shift politically such that more and more college educated people especially more and more sort of white college
educated people were shifting to the Democrats um in large numbers in a way that you know historically I think white college educated Americans tended to you know statistically be more likely to support Republicans but by this point especially 2016 election and onward it's it's been shifting um and then especially at Elite universities I mean it's funny like like the luxury beliefs even when you just look at universities
themselves Eric Kaufman's done some interesting work on this where the more Elite the university the more ideological they are the more they are likely to espouse to luxury beliefs and then the sort of mid-tier and lower
ranking universities are less likely to espouse them um and so you know it overlaps with politics but it really is to me a class driven phenomenon I mean I was raised for a good portion of my childhood by workingclass democrats um
they don't buy into a lot of this [ __ ] I mean then when you look at the uh survey data um working-class Democrats are just like less likely to support you know all kinds you know defund the police is one that I I focus on a lot in the book is that when you break down the defund the police uh like who supported defund the police um the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans both didn't want to do this but then when you break break it down by
income category the people who were the most supportive of defunding the police were um the American in the highest income category and the people that were least supportive were those in the lowest income category um and then when you breing it down by education as well college graduates and especially people with postgraduate degrees were the most likely to support defunding the police relative to people whose highest level
of Education was a high school diploma and so you know there are there are other you know examples of this as well um but essentially you know I think it is more and it's not just purely income based it's class-based right and class
also encompasses education whether you have a parent who went to college like those of things too sort of a culture in your outlook um and so yeah the the luxury beliefs are um you know it's a sort of it's a it's a sort of social
scientific framework so of course naturally it's not going to apply to every single person in in a given category um that's just the way these things work there are sort of correlations but um you know I've I have friends who are affluent and who you know are very much against the lery beliefs idea and yeah I'm sure that you can find people who are working class or who don't uh have high levels of Education who have some sympathy or
support for these things but whenever I discuss the luxury beliefs idea in in my writing I do draw on survey data which does indicate that you know sort of the the more education and the more money someone has regardless of their political party I mean there are Republicans who are high earning who have lots of Education who also have luxury beliefs uh and they're far more likely to have luxury beliefs than a working class
non- col educated Republican um and then to your other point about the uh you know am I the poster boy for for meritocracy I mean you know I actually do think that you know for the most part we live in a meritocracy um you know it's I think like this is this is kind of a myth uh that that people have uh propagated which is like to some extent there are barriers in place but generally you know people who people who aren't like
ideologically adult who are in sort of gatekeeping positions they actually when they meet someone who's capable and talented from uh uh a marginalized background who who you know is who has managed to achieve a bit of success like
they want to help um a lot of people I mean this is like and I think it's actually a uniquely American trait this like willingness I mean you know obviously other cultures have this but to me it's like more pronounced in
American culture that you meet people who were just generous and friendly and kind and want to sort of help people who who need it and who were willing to work hard um and so you know so but there are limits to to this meritocracy idea uh and I and I talk about this in the book too that you know not everyone can like not everyone is equipped to go to college and I don't just mean financially just some people it's just not their thing um
I had friends who yeah they weren't dumb but but they just weren't classroom oriented people who enjoyed learning from books um and so it is great that our system does a pretty good job of finding smart kids not perfect but they
do a pretty good job of finding kids who are smart and talented from communities that are not doing well and they try to put them on a track or give them a scholarship or try to find ways to get them on to that upward Mobility track
but in the book I talk about this idea I haven't I think in the book I call trickle down um ocracy I've also called it trickle down diversity which is this idea that if you I mean what what the elite institutions in America do is they strip mine smart talented capable people out of their communities and reshuffle them into Elite universities um and and Murray's talked about this in some of his work too and other researchers have too which is like
you know if you're you know a working class or poor kid from Red Bluff California or from Ohio or whatever ever and somehow you manage to get into Stanford or Harvard or whatever um those you know I'm not going to go back to Red Bluff the kid from Ohio isn't going to go back to Ohio where we where do we tend to you tend to Cluster in places like San Francisco or New York or Boston or these sort of metropolitan areas that are economically
attractive and lucrative you know people who you know they get a degree they want to they want to receive the financial remuneration and so in a in a perers way I think meritocracy the more effective it is the more polarization you'll see by class by Background by academic abilities um you know people if I'm sure you're familiar with this term many of the listeners do about brain drain about people who um people who are talented or
or academically equipped will leave their communities behind I see you know I see this in like when whenever I is at home when I go back back to Red of California I see it more and more that any you know any any smart ambitious kid is just going to go off to college any smart and ambitious kid who was like me and didn't do well in school they join the military they just get out of there you know no one wants to stay there
because there aren't that many opportunities and so gradually what meritocracy does is it sort of creates this system of you know pipelining people you know out of these areas and into major cities and and fancy universities um and then we have smart people clustering in major cities who think that the path to doing well in life is to just have a big brain and do well in school and the people who make education policy and social Mobility
policy tend to be nerds who are really good at school and they just assume that everyone can be a nerd and be good at school if we just twist the dials of society just right and you know this is probably why there's this lack of
attention and resources uh channeled to things like the trades things you know things like other other avenues for living a you know a satisfying life where you can earn a decent living that people can find ways to um live a
satisfying life that don't involve you know getting a getting a creative and interesting high-paying white collar job this was a point that I made in my original luxury beliefs essay in the New York Post which is that the vast
majority of Americans don't have professions they have jobs they have a job like the kind that I had in high school where you clock in and clock out you you get paid by the hour and that's it um and for people like that I mean
how do you you know as a society we could think more about how to create sources of meaning and fulfillment for those people and instead you know like like what were those sources of meaning you know relationships marriage family kids maybe your local church your religious community um giving back to your neighborhood those kinds of things and there's very little attention paid to those other sources of meaning uh and
instead you know the the whole idea of flourishing and upward Mobility it's like you know people people like me or people you know people that did good in good in their education got got uh good grades or got fancy degrees from a an expensive University um and then we decide that that's you know that's the model for what a good life looks like is just going to college and getting a high paying job and for most people that's
just not in the cards for them and we could think more about how to like it's great that we found ways to make life better for someone like me um but I'm a point you know that that I try to make at least implicitly in my book is like
how do we also find ways to make life better for people like my my friends that I graduated high school with right and um the the other interesting thing to me is you in the in a relatively short period of time like looking at
americ America in the early 20th century um you you could have a situation where you could have a brilliant Baker and an idiot banker and the the the fam's location in society determined pretty much who was going to be which right so uh Brilliance uh didn't get you the ticket that that you got uh because of other social norms uh that were dominant during the time period and and then what we noticed was as meritocracy emerged it
affected things Downstream too because it used to be that the idiot Banker could be married to a brilliant woman and the brilliant Baker could be married to a average woman Etc but what one of the things that we found uh being correlated as Merit emerged and people started getting opportunities to go to Yale Harvard at all was they started marrying other smart people and and then what happened was Intelligence is highly
heritable and so you essentially created sort of a new group of people and and that was happening specifically at a time when the information economy was emerging and so for the really um first time in terms of like just like pure correlation intelligence especially the ability for abstract intelligence and reasoning became a winning ticket in business in trading in in everything and so you see this this new group of people
emerging and and basically like if you want to speculate about it it's like is are we creating a genetic hierarchy here because the you know brilliant people getting married to other brilliant people produce brilliant children and gosh we're in an economy where brilliant people can invent a wonderful app and become a cent a millionaire um and then you've got both the money and the Brilliance um do you see any like does that worry you uh it
it used to um when I first started learning about that sort of learning about assortive mating and heritability and intelligence and these kinds of things I I did wonder that you know is this and you know technology has changed
things so much like you said like in the past I mean yeah there's sort of the cultural component the university is opening up the doors to more people and then the ease of geographic Mobility too that you know even if you did you know
if you lived in the Midwest and you got under Harvard uh in you know 1930 or something like how are you going to get to Boston and you know you had a family and you know there was just like expectations the economy was in in a place such that you know if you were an able-bodied young man like you had to help your family before you went off to college and so all of these transformative uh factors but I read um some work from the
economic historian Greg Clark uh who wrote he's written a few books uh The Sun Also Rises is the one that I read relatively recently and he basically and he analyzed data from various societies the US um England Sweden Japan various um various uh different societies so The Sun Also Rises s o n um meaning so so he he analyzes cames um across history um dating back to I mean I think in in the case of England something like the year 1100 or
1200 did he basically you know because he was looking at Oxbridge and he was like you know have has social Mobility changed since Oxbridge has has basically opened up their doors and it's not just you know the the aristocrats and the ruling class going to the these places and he basically finds almost no change in Social Mobility over time no real change in assortative mating uh and he does this through various ways one one
way that he looks at this question is to to look at so of course women couldn't go to university until fairly recently historically um and so people often point to this example of like you know oh you know in the 1950s a business executive would marry his secretary um and this is an example of sort of cross you know cross educ mating non assortative mating um whereas now you know the executive marries the you know another
executive but Greg Clark looks at um he correlates the social position of the male and the social position of the woman's father and basically finds you know consistently it's it's almost the same so if it's an executive marrying
the secretary the the the secretary's father was probably an executive or probably something similar like roughly in the same social classer category as the man for his his daughter's marrying um and he you know he basically finds
this example um throughout the centuries and He suggests that people are pretty good at kind of sizing up who their match is even if they don't have the external um badges or the uh the trappings of education for example like oh I have a bachelor's degree and you have a bachelor's degree therefore we're a match He suggests that historically people just have conversations with people and can kind of tell like are you
dumb or are you smart like are we a match just through conversation just through our tastes through our habits through our interests and in that way I'm you know in that sense I'm almost like yeah that's interesting that you know even if even if more and more people go to college or there's this you know there's a growing gender gap uh more and more women are going to University than men that maybe um you know initially I was concerned about
this but you know I think like even if more women are going to col college or even if things are changing and more people you know the brain drain I think like somehow people may actually be pretty good uh at finding their match
and that you know if you believe Greg Clark and his work that things aren't really going to change all that much that people are who they are and they mate with who they're going to mate with but again like he's looking at data from
more or less I mean some of the data is pretty recent I think up until like 2000 or 2010 but I just think technology has changed so dramatically since the mid 20th century that you know it's it's like the worries that you and I have like those may actually be completely valid and we just haven't sort of seen the full effect yet so we'll see yeah um f final question I could talk to you forever and I'm noticing I'm getting the
hook from our several of our producers like Jim shut up um but I it seems to me and I would love your take on this that kind of the Overton window is changing um I mean the what happened recently at the ivys with with uh Harvard in particular um the the kind of it was kind of like public knowledge versus private knowledge right where where everyone kind of knows but then something happens and everyone in the public is yeah and they and they and
they jump on the thing um and you know the inartful communication they brought it on themselves right but in in in in the past I don't know that that for example president gay would have been forced to resign at Harvard and now she's
gone and and do you think that the Overton window is changing a bit as these things as you said uh quoting somebody else that everybody lives on campus now yeah I mean yeah I I I agree I think like three or four years ago
would have been Unthinkable um for yeah president gay Harford to be fired or pressured to resign um so things are changing uh and it's nice to see because people have been talking about this for a while like basically ever since 2015 people are saying ah you know [ __ ] people are finally realizing The Madness of the campus and people are finally realizing and I think like it's actually true now you know it's kind of a cliche
at this point you know8 nine years later but it I think it is the case I mean we know there's there's hard evidence of this now the president at Penn also resigned I mean people are saying like something is happening here this identity politics stuff this you know the oppressor oppressed you know like anti-Semitism being condoned on campus is I mean that that would have been Unthinkable 10 years ago but now we're at this point now where you
know yeah it's just I I yeah it was it was unbelievable to see it and so um the Overton window I think is changing it's shifting people are a bit more open and honest and and people have been like you said like there's this sort of preference falsification there people have been kind of quiet and worried about oh should I say this should I not but now you know there's been these very public events and people finally feel completely free to speak
out I mean I feel it too I mean you know there've been a couple of things I mean leaving Cambridge finally getting my degree and not being tied to any particular institution has been very liberating um and yeah I do like to think that you know you I think if you are in a position to do so I understand like everyone has different risk profiles if you are a professor and you have mouths to feed and you have a family um and you
don't want to lose your job then yes of course like your risk profile is different but if you're you know you're like me you know relatively young you don't have kids and you make your living in a way that is kind of you know
shielded from the vages of social media then yeah I've been trying to point out some of these things for a while and you know I think it's has some non-trivial effect if everyone collectively starts to tell the truth and I think like that
did have some non-trivial effect on sort of the shifts around campus that we're seeing now and you know sort of realizing what's been happening and finally coming to our senses so I mean they're not perfect I don't really see you know the universities are still in not a great place um I think the president of Yale got very lucky like I just briefly so Peter salv at Yale I mean he was the president when I was there too but he
you know so somehow he there was a story about how he almost went to that hearing but like somehow it didn't have to go I don't remember the exact reasoning but right at like the day after the hearing um like the Yale Daily News approach to him like what did you think of the hearing what did you think of you know the president at Harvard anden so on and so forth and he basically gave this like very um you know sort of milk toast like
you know yeah I mean you know basically agreeing but like not fully committing to it like well they had some interesting things to say and it's true you know like you know harassment or bullying and it depends on the terms and the terminology and play the word game um and then like once he saw you know the public outcry and the backlash and the president aten resigned immediately or like the day after or something and then they reapo salv at
Yale and he was like oh it was horrible you know I completely condemn anti-Semitism and you know so he's like you know sort of where you know where does the wind blow you know oh I have to go you know it's like because at when when you're the president of an elite institution like that you are like 50% politician and so I kind of understand it but you know it's just that the fact that he was like that and he was just
sort of you know bending to the wind it's you know that's that's still this stuff still exists on campus then it's going to take like more of a concerted effort but you know what we're seeing at least the start yeah do you
have another book in the works I mean I don't have anything on paper uh in terms of you know writing or contract but you know if this book does well and if there's interest then you know I would I would like to do some kind of luxury
beliefs book um you know it would focus on luxury beliefs but you know just a sort of a a summary a kind of a a tour of status and signaling Theory Prestige and dominance you know interest in power uh you know the dark Triad the light Triad you know just to basically like some of the my idios syncratic taste and interest in Psychology if I could find a way to Market that into a luxury beliefs book I would I would I think I would
enjoy that but we'll see you know one book at a time that would be fun well listen this is I'm always have a great time when I talk to you uh I'm gonna give you I this will be how many times that you get to be the emperor of the world
you're see just through a sheer number alone you're going to be the actual emperor of the world um so you know the rules you can't put anyone in a you you can't act like an ivy league and you can't have thought beliefs and
indoctrination camps but you can whisper something into a magic microphone and incept all eight billion people with two thoughts they're going to wake up the next day they're going to think that the idea was theirs what are you going to incept in the world's population well I'm glad that I I actually prepared for this one because I listening to your your uh show for a while now I think the other you know at least a couple of
occasions in the past that unprepared but I'm just going to go with uh a couple of the um the lessons that I learned uh so I I did a Twitter thread and it was later sort of published a more uh cal um sort of format uh in the Free Press lessons I learned and two of the more important ones that I that I listed so one was um that your choices shape your identity not the other way around and the idea here being that you know I think some people they
start out from this position of I'm a I'm a member of this category that I'm a I'm a republican I'm a Democrat I'm a I'm a man or a woman or what have you and therefore I have to believe XYZ and therefore these are the actions that I'll take but instead one thing that I've learned is it's actually the other way around it's you know what you do matters not you know whatever identity category you belong to and that's sort
of over time your decisions and your actions that shapes what your identity is and not necessarily in terms of the categories we normally think about um and then the other is that uh you know a lot of the things that happen in our
lives are not our fault um but they but how we live our life is still our responsibility um you know a lot of a lot of people and a lot of members of the luxury belief class I think they like to point out or try to justify or
excuse you know if if you had this kind of life or that kind of life or what through these experien is somehow that exonerates you from having to still be like a good person and at least strive towards you know trying to improve your life and the lives of those around you um and so that was another another lesson I learned so yeah that uh responsibility and and and your choices I think those are important things to to
keep in mind I love those too I I it's a shame that I gave you a shot to uh prepare so but those are great and the book is available everywhere um and I highly recommend buying a copy I think it's a great book so thanks for taking the time with us Rob and best of luck on the books and next time you're on we'll probably be we'll probably have trong and and we'll be arguing about some movie yes I'm looking forward to it sounds great all right