The Real Agenda Of Those In Power - Rob Henderson

what do you make of the last few months of Fallout from Yale and Harvard and such I mean yeah we saw that big uh testimonial from the presidents yeah it was Harvard MIT Penn uh I mean I wasn't surprised by it I mean a lot of people I think are finally fully realizing they're coming to their senses people have been saying this for a while now oh you know eventually the pendulum will swing back and people will finally figure out what's really going on in these institutions and the sort of ideology that's been spilling out of the universities and now I think they finally are actually truly realizing it but yeah I saw the it's kind of the birth of what a lot of people call wokeness uh in 2015 when I arrived on campus at Yen that was my first semester I saw what was happening there and yeah I mean I think you can draw a straight line from some of those events in 2015 to what we're seeing now and yeah it's been really ugly but you know kind of kind of amusing you know from my perspective because I you know I was one of the I'd like to think that I was one of the sort of early uh observers and people who could recognize what was occurring and then later on you know so Jordan Peterson was was another and and there have been other critics of higher ed and especially these Elite universities um but yeah it's been uh really really amusing and and and also sort of disheartening to to see it yeah it's this this sort of odd blend of fatalism Shard and Freud nihilism sort of pleasure displeasure yeah like ick pity yeah uh it's a real concatenation of of things and obviously we've got a couple of mutual friends that have either been directly or tangentially involved Vincent uh my mutual friend I managed to get removed from a higher education institution because of him appearing on this podcast Carol hoen uh who is you know a really good mutual friend um has kind of been thrust into the middle of this she told me that she basically felt like she'd been used like a a football um and for the people who know who Carol is she went on Rogan I think she cried like six times on Joe's show she cried at least three times on mine we went for breakfast I'm pretty sure she cried like three times at breakfast she's just a very sort of emotional person she is she she's really sort of feeling this and uh yeah you realize in a sort of proxy [ __ ] battle like this the people that are useful political footballs to be kicked around often end up paying a pretty high price and no one ever thinks about them because you're like oh no but you're you know you're a flaming Warrior for free speech or whatever and you go well yeah but I didn't ask to be yeah yeah very few people want to be fired I mean it's a lot of people may not be familiar with just how difficult it is to get an academic job in the first place I mean I you know I'm friends with Vincent I saw I mean he was hustling hard and he had a very impressive academic record and no one wants to be in that position I think the their their critics or their detractors say like oh you know oh poor me with your cancel culture and now look at you going on all these podcasts and playing a your victimhood and all of this but that's not what it is I think it's for some people it's just a consolation that well I lost my dream job at the very least I can sort of communicate [ __ ] something exactly and yeah I was observing all of this from afar I mean one thing that I've pointed out before is that for every like public academic cancellation you see there are probably 5 to 10 others that are not covered in the media most people actually don't enjoy the Limelight that much especially academics who tend to be kind of weird nerds with their obscure Niche interest they just want to keep their down do their research be left alone and then suddenly they are accused of X Y or Z and they just want to silently you know have it blow over um and that's like the sort of modal case that's the usual case um and so yeah it's been uh we can see it now that uh finally people are recognizing that there's a there's a serious issue I didn't even want to an academic job I mean by the time I was probably about halfway through my PhD I saw what was happening I remember uh yeah I would have very very contentious discussions with other PhD students and postdocs and kind of early career researchers and I would tell them like I don't think that you know if you color Outside the Lines if you are an independent thinker it will be very difficult for you to get a sort of typical 10e track academic job now um not impossible but just much harder than it would have been maybe 10 or 15 years ago and people would say oh no that's ridiculous it's ridiculous and now you know four four plus years later I'm seeing like some of those are having difficulty some of them have been hired and fired by now I mean it's been you know I've seen the whole the whole spectrum of of outcomes some of them have successfully obtain jobs and just you know keep their mouth shut but for me I just that wasn't what I thought Academia was going to be like yeah um I thought it was going to be you know this little kind of contained bubble you know the I guess some people call it the Ivory Tower right where you can live that life of the mind and communicate interesting ideas and debate and disagree but still sort of inch your way towards the truth or at least int inway towards interesting ideas but you know that's interestingly happening more on places like podcasts and substack and uh alternate sort of parallel institutions yeah it's fascinating to think uh as well about I guess soft cancellation so had Ricky Schlott on who co-authored the cancelling of the American mind with Greg lukanov and um she was talking about all of the different ways that people kind of get soft cancelled and it's it's just not being invited to the end of your party uh you know it's people sitting in different locations to you I think she went to maybe NYU Stern and um she was hiding Jordan Peterson books under her bed um you know like [ __ ] Anne Frank in the Attic that philosophical an Frank um and she was saying that you know it's there's lots of um sort of ideological [ __ ] tests she called them which I thought was a really great name uh you know what do you think about Ben Shapiro you know just like [ __ ] throw that hand grenade into into the room and see if anyone pipes up and or doesn't pipe up that was something that I learned when I was in grad school was does anyone just remain silent and not say oh he's so he's an evil right-wing whatever right if they just kind of keep their head down and don't say anything you know I sort of oh I observed that silence is compliance of whatever silence is violence or yeah whatever it is what about the um you had this interesting idea about the hidden hierarchies of the Harvard Extension school thing yeah yeah well I saw that with you know I was I was you know observing what was occurring on Twitter SLX with Christopher rufo who was one of the sort of Architects of uh pointing out and removing the the Harvard Professor after her comments about you know kind of condoning anti-Semitism on campus and then discovering her plagiarism and all this but you know a after he you know he was perceived to be successful I mean she was she was ousted she was pressured to resign and she did all of these professors at Elite University ities and all of these you know this you know University supporting members of the chattering class were saying oh Christopher rufo got a degree from the Harvard Extension school and you know did are people aware that that's not the real Harvard and people do people understand that that's not typically what we think of as uh a real Graduate Studies degree at a m it's not a real master's degree from Harvard uh and you know they they just wanted people to be very aware that this you know this this sort of Outsider this PL who got this degree from this extension school he's not a real academic he's not a real serious thinker yeah he's written books yes he works at a at a very prominent Think Tank and yes he's like very successful in the real world but he has his degree for which is sort of getting things backwards right you want the degree um in order to signify that you're capable in the real world but you know they have the oh this guy's capable in the real world but now they're looking at the the the degree as if it's it's somehow um it's fraudulent and therefore this uh nullifies all of his that's indicative of his real value exactly yeah they're they're placing his value on the the educational credential rather than uh on his Effectiveness in in his life and in his career so you know I'm watching this and I'm thinking like yeah this is exactly I mean I'm I'm I've seen this you know since entering College since entering higher ed this strange status anxiety particularly among people who attend these kind of Institutions I mean the people who were pointing this out about rufo's degree were professors or graduates of whatever Harvard or Oberlin or Stanford whatever like these these of places people didn't knew the language they understood what an extension school was yes exactly and and it's just amazing to me that Harvard even has this program in the first place because it relies on that duplicitous game of uh you know if you're if you're a what a member of the unwashed masses and you go to the Harvard Extension School website it actually says we are Harvard you will have the Harvard degree you can put it it even says something like you'll have the you know you'll be able to put Harvard on your resume this is on the official website um while Sim multaneously communicating the coded message to everyone else at Harvard and everyone else in this sort of rarified segment of society that you know we have to do that you know we have to put that on the website but it's not really hard you're not on the main stage you're kind of on the second stage in the festival it's like the Overflow room why would like it's just it shocks me that they're willing to take the reputational hit to operate a degree Mill I mean to me it's just very like tody like it's almost like you know I have this maybe this judgmental atttitude I like this is like very kind of vulgar that you guys would even do this in the first place that you're playing this game and yeah I thought it was very yeah very ugly the way that they were they were pointing this out about rufo and it also ended up backfiring I think because they felt this sort of this faction of cultural Elites and these Legacy institutions felt threatened they felt like they had received an l and so they had to lash out and get back at him well it's the same as you know someone does something to you a really cutting Jive and you're like uh uh [ __ ] shoes like it's just you know it's the only thing like [ __ ] just gra at I remember once there this guy so funny there this uh dude stood in the front door of a nightclub complaining about the fact that he couldn't get in and he just kept on chirping and kept on chirping and kept on chirping and I was feeling particularly pissy that day or whatever so I said something back to him and I've got like two or three 6'4 Jordy gorillas either side of me that are working and I'm busy trying to organize clipboards or something else and he couldn't think of anything to do so I had a a necklace on of some kind like on the outside of a T-shirt and he sort of reached forward and like grab grabbed that and like that was the one thing and then sort of scuttled off and I bro like my 35 like fashion neet necklace isn't a big deal but just that that's the one thing and it's kind of the same as Christopher rufo like wwww I extension school like it's not you're not part of the real chattering classes yeah yeah that's exact yeah it was very like shortsighted and and ultimately I think it was damaging to them of oh anyone else that's got that degree or is thinking about going to that place is oh well they said that ultimately when the rubber meets the road Chris rufo is like just one of the [ __ ] like peasants the same as the rest of us right so maybe I shouldn't think about oh that's interest so you're saying that that anyone who might want to apply for the Harvard Extension school will see that and so they'll have fewer applicants you know the institution will ultimately be less profitable I didn't even think about that part definitely less prestigious I was I was thinking on the reputation end of it rather than the sort of economic end but yeah this this idea that um that people will observe I mean I thought it was an error for two reasons one was that it was most people don't like snobs right so they see this and they just feel like icky about it that they're even pointing this out in the first place or that they think that they're somehow Superior um they don't like that attitude and then the second was that uh it to me it kind of exposed the the hollow of the egalitarian Dogma the supposed egalitarian dogma of elite Academia that you know oh we're all for equity and you know Dei or whatever it is that we're so accepting and tolerant and welcoming uh but by the way like you know your your aristocratic title is fraudulent and you're a fake and you know so you know I was texting a friend earlier about this he's he's actually a grad student at Harvard and I was like my impression of this was basically like the attitude at Elite universities is everyone is equal but some people are less equal than others right it's sort of a spin on on the the uh the animal farm idea we're all you you had that George Orwell quote um you said how in the road to Wigan piia George Orwell's explaining how upper class snobs while theoretically pining for a classless society cling Like Glue to their miserable fragments of social Prestige I love that yeah I love that line I mean the whole yeah the book is great Orwell was so astute in his analysis of class but that was just yeah I mean this has been going on for you know 100 years now and that was the first thing that came to mind when I was seeing this that you know these these supposedly open-minded tolerant welcoming people were suddenly pointing out that he got a degree from from the institution right like it's your website you got over the you got over the bar that everybody asked for but you kind of landed in an awkward place on the crash man yeah you know and yeah you're so right it's this and this is why fundamentally I think that people are so skeptical and critical of anyone who prizes about their morality or how ethical or how caring they are publicly you go what are you covering up for I don't believe that you actually think that and sure enough when the gloves are off and you see someone in a little bit of pressure or receiving a little bit of heat where did they go well all of the inclusivity and egalitarianism and care for the beauty of Academia overall all of that's out the window yeah yeah when the pressure is on right when people feel threatened when they feel in a sense of sort of emotional intensity a lot of negative emotion suddenly you know the mask slips and you can see what toys are out of the pram they're just as and you know this is the concern that people had all along yeah it's like oh that's what we thought you were like we thought that you were high futing not actually caring adrenic com drinking L hooded nose pentagram dancing like [ __ ] and sure enough your your mask has slipped so I mean this you've got your brand new book out which everyone can go and buy right now that you're go and buy this very second we haven't ever spoken about this because pretty much since I've known you at some point you've been working on your Memoir troubled yeah luxury beliefs yeah that is a kind of example of luxury belief although it's not patient zero how do you explain to my audience that hasn't yet heard you talk about a topic that you've repop poiz how do you explain luxury beliefs right luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes and a core component of a luxury belief is that the believer is often sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief um and you know we can get into specific examples but yeah I like this one that we've been sort of touching on this snobbish attitude about higher ed and how yeah so on the one hand I mean you're when when people are pointing out that this school or that school is better than the other um you are sort of boosting your own status right especially these people who are already graduates of or teaching at these institutions they bolstering their own status uh and then you know they by by speaking in this way about the hierarchies and you know which school is actually above which other school they are sort of inflicting costs on everyone else who would like to ascend the educational ladder who would like to get a degree um but a lot of these people just don't interact much with people who uh are upwardly mobile or trying to be upwardly mobile who are trying to go to university trying to get a degree um the vast majority and I and I talk about a lot of the statistics in my book about this in the later chapters about how more than 80% of IV League graduates have at least one parent who went to University I mean that's they're sort of immersed in it from birth they've never actually interacted with a person or had a 15-minute conversation with someone who doesn't have a degree or on their way to getting a degree uh and it's just not on their radar and so in their world you know everyone went to University or everyone should go or you know anyone who did doesn't go to the same category of University that they went to there's something wrong with them and I noticed this a lot uh when when I arrived on campus I mean and it's very subtle I mean at first I was sort of you know to some degree I think I was duped because I fell for the oh everyone's equal everyone's fine everyone and you know also the other thing about these these institutions now is that they don't they don't look the same right one of the the ideas about or one of the components of the luxury belief idea is that luxury beliefs have to a large extent replaced luxury goods uh which isn't to say that luxury goods don't still signify status brand names and all of those things still matter but my claim is that that luxury goods have become a noisier signal of status you can't tell right away necessarily anymore when you just go about your life in public who's rich and who's poor just by how they look um and so you know I build on these sort of sociological Frameworks uh in my writing and my book um work from Thorston Vin at the turn of the 20th century he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class he wrote about how you know the upper class the aristocrats of his time uh they demonstrated their status through you know Tuxedos and evening gowns and pocket watches and monal and uh expensive and intricate hobbies and uh attending lavish events uh hiring servants those kinds of things and then by the mid 20th century there was a sociologist named Pierre bordeu who wrote a book called distinction a social critique of the Judgment of taste uh and one of his insights in that book was that um rich people affluent people they'll convert their economic capital into cultural capital uh and so they'll spend money money in order to demonstrate their class or exhibit their membership into this rarified Strat of society and so in his day you know again in the mid- 20th century and he was mostly commenting on French culture but people can sort of understand what you know what he's getting at where people would spend spend money to uh learn about the subtleties of wine or the intricacies of art or uh fashion yeah falconry or or beagling or golf or these kinds of you know that you have to have money you can't uh be the kind of person who works Emanual job or who you know yeah soft you see the same thing in almost uh the reverse in Asian societies at the moment when I went to Thailand for the first time all of the receptionists were wearing lighter makeup on their face and I thought to myself why cuz it's so silly because the you know the face finishes on whatever the jawline here and you know the blending between the face and the neck is difficult to do and I thought why and I asked someone why the [ __ ] are they like face making their faces pale at and they said oh well it's because the indigent laborers the people that work out in the fields are heavily tanned so the higher class jobs are the ones that are inside which means that the paler you are the more status you is conferred on you by your profession but then I also realized how stupid of me and how you know myopically Western of me to do that coming from Newcastle upon time the Jersey Shore of the UK where girls turn themselves orange to signify I have all of this leisure time I'm able to go away on holiday to exotic places and by the beach and get sun on me I like that yeah yeah that's very interesting yeah yeah so if you if you live in like northern Europe or somewhere cold where there isn't a lot of sun having a tan is the the signifier status so yeah I think yeah that's that's an important Point here that you know it it does vary from culture to culture I mean I point you know I point this out the research and everything in my writing about how status itself the specific examples and manifestations can be ephemeral they can be they can vary by time and place and culture and generation and so on but the desire for status the desire to exhibit it to show other people how prestigious or how dominant or how um you know how important you are that that remains and so my my claim is that luxury beliefs I mean they're mostly confined to that sort of Highly Educated people who attend the universities people who study there people who are graduates of these places uh who tend to operate uh Legacy institutions who run uh media and and and Academia and who generate people who work in sort of culturally influential um organizations and a lot of them hold these luxury beliefs I think we saw this uh in 2020 and 2021 with the defund the police movement I mean I coined the term luxury beliefs in 2019 and started uh to to write about it and do the research to sort of support this idea and point everything out that um uh sort of all of all of the the the the sociological concepts under ging it and then the like 6 months later people started talking about defunding the police I was like I don't even have to like I felt like I didn't even have to like you know here's the reasoning behind luxury belief is just defund the police like it's right there you don't even have to it's the most whenever somebody brings up your work to me and talks about luxury beliefs the patient zero example is defund the police yeah because it's so intuitive of course can you explain why that encapsulates luxury beliefs s of structurally or functionally so well yeah yeah so so yeah the luxury beliefs idea if you say defund the police you are increasing your own status because I mean you look like a caring person you look open-minded and interesting and and uh and highly educated um and so and it also signifies that you're the kind of person who went to certain kinds of schools you consume certain kinds of media you listen to certain kinds of podcasts and so on um and so it makes you look a certain way to your peers but once the support for defund the police becomes implemented into policy once police stations and police departments uh have reduced funding once you cultivate an attitude so it's not just the policy but you're also cultivating the culture and the attitude around law enforcement that oh we don't need police uh you sort of give permission to people to be suspicious of police or to be derogatory towards police um as a result we saw that a lot of a lot of police officers started retiring in large numbers uh there's reports in in major US cities that they're having difficulty with recruitment because if you're smart capable young person who wants to make a difference in your community like why would you want that job uh if you know that people are going to view you with suspicion or with some kind of you know that that you're sort of malicious or or evil I mean cops I mean they get paid okay but it's not like uh considering the the potential danger they face in their job part of the reason why people would want to do it is because cops formerly used to be seen as respectable and and and admirable and people convert a lot of status onto them well think about the difference between when a policeman currently in in the sort of current defund the police era that we're in policeman turns up at the scene versus a firefighter or an ambulance A&E person you know the other two emergency services are seen heralded as Heroes yeah and the police like is it aab mhm aab or all cops are bastards forgot about that yeah yeah yeah and and so who wants that job and so gradually and saw this uh in the aftermath of the defund the police movement that violent crime spiked all across the US especially major cities uh homicide rates increased to levels not seen since the early 1990s um and so when all of this was unfolding I actually I tried to find some survey data to see like who's actually you know like because I don't know anyone in my personal life who thinks that we should defund the police I mean other than you know some some people at C Cambridge and other Elite universities but ordinary people who are outside of these institutions I didn't know anyone who was supporting this movement so I had a suspicion this was you know actually a legitimate luxury belief I looked at survey data for it um found one in yugov in 2020 which found that they they collected data from a representative sample of Americans and they broke down the data by income category and it was the highest income Americans who were the most supportive of defunding the police and it was the lowest income Americans who were the least supportive uh and then when when um later there the different different uh findings were uh reported for major US cities like Minneapolis and Detroit uh one in New York City uh they found that white Democrats were far more supportive of defunding the police than Black and Hispanic Democrats and so it was like the the the people who were supposedly uh so so kind and so uh sympathetic towards uh the marginalized and the dispossessed and the poor and so on they were supporting something that actually those groups didn't even want and I mean an increased number of them were being victimized as a result of it um in my book I point out that uh if you compare the lowest income Americans to Americans who earn the median income there's what is it they're two to three times more likely to be victims of of violent uh crimes they're uh seven times more likely to be victims of assault they're 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault like essentially across the board the lower your income the more likely you are to be a target of crime could do with the police yes exactly you could yeah it would be nice have someone you could call if you're being burglarized or or assaulted um and so yeah it was a it was a complete uh uh sort of backfiring and I haven't seen you know there hasn't really been any sort of accountability or any kind of um acknowledgement of what happened in the aftermath of that movement yeah it's wild and then obviously the the big elephant in the room here is that the people who were supporting it are the ones who are the most likely to live in a gated community in an area or a neighborhood that has not called the police in a decade since the last time that someone from the community that they're probably talking about trying to protect accidentally wandered through their gated community uh so it's rules for thee but not for me and let me explain to you poor underclass peasant person what is best for you from my vantage point out here in my very comfortable home yes yes yeah yeah so that's yeah that's one of the components of the luxury Bel is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of the belief and so yeah the people who were supporting the defund the police movement uh largely college educated living in safe communities living in gated communities there were reports um during the the political unrest in 2020 and all of the BLM demonstrations and so on all of the riots that people in sh like rich people in Chicago were hiring private security to patrol their neighborhoods because you know the police were either distracted due to all of the uh social unrest and crime that was occurring uh or because police were retiring and so on and so they were hiring Private Security in these um rich neighborhoods and then in New York City there were reports of people just fleeing to The Hamptons like you know if you have money and you have resources you can just flee to your private little gated area and from home start tweeting about defund the police and get all the likes and plot it my God you're so caring I know the cops are so wrong like they're treating these poor black people so badly and you can I mean I think people who are um sort of affluent upper middle class people they have a mistaken view of what sort of Poverty Looks like their only exposure to it is when they see um when when they see it reported in the media when it's a criminal who's committed some kind of uh transgression and that surfaces up and then they learn about the criminals backstory and they start to feel sympathetic and so on and so forth and there's not nearly as much time spent on the victims of that person's crime and so in and often what happens is that in in at at least the the imagination of this Strat of society that you know they conflate poverty with criminality and the reason why someone commits crimes is because they're poor without really digging into the data or the research and understanding that the vast majority of poor people never commit any crimes they're more they're far more likely to be victims of crime than a perpetrator and they don't really think about this and then through the sort of portrayal of poverty I think in pop culture is kind of mistaken too at least in more sort of recent media where you know very few TV shows it's just not exciting to see some workingclass person making you know minimum wage going to work clocking in clocking out going home to their family and living a normal life but it's more interesting to see you know the the struggling school teacher who decides to break bad and start cooking meth and lashing out at the system and that's just a much more interesting story uh and so that is I mean there was this movie that came out I think it was last year the year before Emily the criminal with Aubrey Plaza I don't know if you saw it but it was I mean it was like the perfect kind of movie for this for this you know the luxury belief class it's this young woman who works in food catering and she has this [ __ ] boss and she has dream I think she she is a college graduate she has dreams of being an artist but she has difficulty monetizing her artwork and so she caters food but then she like gets hooked in with this gang and like learns how to shoplift and you know the whole thing is like you know well you know Screw the system you know I can't make money off my artwork and I have to work in food catering and this is just ridiculous and so I'm going to you know start stealing and and robbing people and and the movie is portraying this as like a perfectly reasonable course of action right and uh this is like it's basically like Breaking Bad but the young woman version for yeah yeah and uh yeah I just think it's uh that's that's part of what drives the luxury beliefs phenomenon yeah it's wild man and when you see that you you really can't unse see it uh Mary Harrington had this about a lot of the advances that were proposed by the feminist movement in the 50s 60s s and 70s were um put forward by women For Whom the impact wouldn't affect them so a perfect example is I guess the push toward Independence and uh the derogation of chivalry by men because chivalry in some ways can be patronizing must be patronizing to women like I can open the door for myself right I can carry my own bags right like I can pull my own share out I can pay for my own dinner and in a world where women are trying to find and establish themselves socioeconomically as independent agents aside from the husband or partner that they're supposed to need I can understand why that would be the case but as she said it is a direct line from men shouldn't open the door and don't need to to why you shouldn't hit your wife right because the consensus is women are more fragile vulnerable and need to be protected and men should be the ones that do that protecting and it's the women who are married to men who had a two- parent household old who had a relatively good example of how to treat women when they were growing up who have been through all of the institutions that have kind of softly embedded what chivalry is in any case because that's just the way that a a more sophisticated social life goes MH but that doesn't think about women who are in an underclass or workingclass environment who are in a relationship with a guy who never knew his father whose mom was cycling in and out of different boyfriends or Partners or whatever in the house who was maybe abused used physically or verbally or emotionally or whatever while they were growing up all of whom's friends are Ruffians that are going about and antisocial behavior and all of this stuff and it's like well I know that for you lady that drives a Mercedes-Benz you might like the idea of being liberated from men holding the door open for you but Downstream from that you've also liberated women from being protected from their underclass partner from hitting them when he gets annoyed on a nighttime and uh I really I just thought that that was such an interesting frame the same thing goes for uh support for um abortion rights right when you think about that is I think that it is skewed toward the people in the upper class believe that it is a great idea to restrict abortion rights overall to give less access but you think well maybe if you were woman 213 of one particular Village somewhere who's six kids deep yeah to three different men maybe easy access to birth control would be a good thing for them to have and uh yeah it's just it's so interesting how it can be split up by race or it can be split up by class or it can be split up within gender yeah yeah yeah yeah it's yeah that was I mean it's it's interesting because I think that a lot of the people who promote these views or who think that these are sort of progressive or fashionable or enlightened they don't think about how it would affect someone outside of their social strata or they mistakenly overextend the way that they think to everyone else that well here's what would be good for me or here's what would be good for my class or my group and therefore it would be good for everyone or the only reason why other people aren't thinking like me or aren't pursuing the same kind of life as me is because they don't have the same uh or or because my preferences aren't aren't implemented in society or throughout culture I mean that yeah what you said earlier about about Mary Harrington's point is interesting I mean I I saw this firsthand that where I grew up basically anyone anyone like you know uh who was remotely sort of academically inclined you know went off to some State University everyone who who wasn't but still had some sort of uh restlessness or ambition they joined the military and then all the guys who were left behind I mean there's there's you know not not much left for the women there to to pick from and a lot of these guys did grow up without dads or without good sort of male role models around and yeah I mean yeah what ends up happening often is like you know women get imp you know they have children with multiple men or the men uh you know they they have multiple partners and don't interact with their kids I mean I you know I now have friends that I graduated from high school with who are these guys and yeah it's just it looks very different right like that um the sort of Liberation and the belief that you know women don't need a man or men shouldn't uh you know women can live the same kind of Life as a man and maybe it's true if you are affluent and you go off to college and you're going to be a young professional uh career-driven person fig is but if you're just working a menial job and you're not I mean most people aren't going to derive a ton of satisfaction from the way that they make money well there's a story that you I remember you telling me maybe about some lady friend that you'd spoken to about she said that we should be able to move beyond the nuclear family because it's restrictive and constraining yeah yeah this was um someone I graduated from Yale with we were somehow got on the topic of family and future and this kind of thing and she was basically telling me that yeah marriage is this outdated patriarchal institution and we should Society should move Beyond it we should evolve get past it and so I asked her well how did you grow up what was your like family life situation when you were a child and she said you know I was raised by my mom and my dad and you know I did have that kind of you know conventional family and then I asked her what she planned to do later in her you know once you know cuz she was planning to she was working at a technology firm she was going to go to law school but I asked her in her future when she has a family or if she wanted a family what would she do and she said oh yeah you know I do want a family someday and I'll probably get married and have a husband and you know essentially get married and like you know partake in this outdated patriarchal institution and so I was thinking that okay you benefited from this uh age-old ancient sort of patriarchal but you know this institution and you plan to carry the benefits of that uh Arrangement forward for your own children but your official public position is no one should do this it's outdated she was sort of denigrating it trying to downplay it saying other people shouldn't do this and to me it seemed very duplicitous that you know this clearly marriage has positive benefits I mean that was something that I learned when I got to college was almost every single one of my classmates and peers came from two parent families whereas where I grew up it was basically zero and so clearly marriage had some you know some kind of effect here um and yet the place the the the the group that is the most likely to downplay the benefits of marriage are the most likely to be products of successful marriages under are the most likely to form marriages themselves how come you're not more bitter about your childhood uh I mean I I used to be I used to actually be more Angry uh when I was in my late teens early 20s um I mean I think part of it was just getting older um I think just age you just things just kind of tend to like burn out and dim over time anyway um and I think you know the other was just a lot of sort of self uh focused work uh self improvement um trying to you know get past it and put it all into context and realize you know that that on the one hand people are of responsible for they do in their lives um but on the other I mean to understand the sort of to understand the genealogy of the ideas that led us to this point that's been helpful too to understand that yes like dayto day we have agency over our lives but the sort of there are these decisions and and cultural trajectories and all of these other forces that are in place that that play a role too and so you know when I start to dig to at the root of this of you know who is responsible for some of these ideas who uh promotes the luxury beliefs and so on and entering into institutions where I can see it you know I can it helps me to just understand it and I think that sort of settles my you know settles my anger a bit too it's very interesting thinking about that I I had a s chaver on she's a psychotherapist pushing back very hard against what she calls Instagram therapy which is identifying everybody as victim and that they've got trauma and stuff and she said um remembering that you experiened trauma isn't being a victim making your identity out of it is yeah yeah yeah I think that's well put I mean I didn't really I didn't really think of myself as a victim and and people didn't call me a victim I never thought on those terms until I got to college before that it was just day-to-day life I mean it was just you know trying to struggling to get by trying to make money trying to whatever living paycheck to paycheck and then later joining the military and you know just my my uh plate was full later um you know sort of towards the end of my enlistment before I entered College I did um do a stint in in rehab and I talked to uh therapists and you know I did sort of address a lot of the issues that I had experienced when I was a kid and that was helpful too I think to just sort of contextualize it and also to um I know just sort of be more open with the people I grew up with and close with you know my sister and my mom and all these people to just you my adopted family to to talk to them about all of this I mean that's helpful too I think there is this um this tendency for young people young men in particular that you know self-sufficiency will solve all your problems to just be completely self-reliant you don't have to rely on anyone you know your your relationships are sort of peripheral um and I Liv that way for a while and it probably did help um to sort of I don't know led me to equip myself to be you know a self-sufficient person but later you know I did realize that actually relationships are important I mean I went through I think the first six years um after I left home I never visited um I never visited for the holidays I never visited for for any kind of special occasions I mean I did visit like you know on and off whenever you know really whenever it suited my schedule I was very selfish um but then later you know now I make an effort now I make an effort to do all those things and um realize that actually you know all of these things relationships are more important than than you think especially when you're young right there there is uh there's value there um even if you think there isn't yeah there's a degree of Romanticism about monk mode and lone rangering it uh and I think my current theory on this is that monk mode is a great tool but a bad Master H because if you continue to pray at the altar of it over a long enough amount of time the reason that you're doing some equivalent of Monk mode right which is uh a overreliance on self-sufficiency introspection and isolation so that you can focus on making yourself into a better version of you because quite rightly there are a lot of distractions out there in the world and if you're trying to do a ton of self-work or you going to therapy or you're in rehab you're probably not going to have the most flourishing social life it's going to be difficult for you to juggle all of these plates and if you do try and juggle all of the plates you're going to restrict your progress in that area like committing yourself to one thing or a very narrow band of things is more than it's not additive it's multiplicative right it allows you to Triple down quadruple down all of your efforts into one very tight area and I found myself toward the end of my 20s through my manop pause that I I really really enjoyed monk mode but I saw especially for someone that has introverted Tendencies and I get my energy mostly from being on my own a lot of the time that it started to become more alluring to me than being back out into the world but the problem with that is the reason that you're doing the monk mode thing or the rehab thing or whatever is to form yourself into a functional member of society who can then go and reintegrate and that's the problem that the progress can become addictive to the point where it stops you from doing the thing you're like the thing that you're doing is sacrificing the thing that you are doing it in order to get yeah yes yeah yeah yeah you sort of mistake the the means for the end the end goal you're sort of yeah yeah it's um and I think it's difficult to to keep in mind I think a lot of people have difficulty with that especially when you're young you like what what are your actions attempting to accomplish what's your overarching goal um you know Robert Green makes that distinction between tactician versus strategist right the tactician is just what's directly in front of you what do you need to do next and the strategist is well what's all of this for like what are each of those steps trying to get you to and I think yeah when you're young you just think oh I want to make money and like money becomes the thing and it's like well what's the money for like what do you want to do with that money when you build up your bank account what is that the goal is just to have a big number uh on your uh balance or is it to take care of your loved ones to have the freedom to be able to interact with people that you care about and to provide and those kinds of things and I I think I I mean I kind of came to that realization when I was in my mid 20s but it wasn't until my later 20s really probably right not until I was about to start grad school I was was like 20 28 but I really had that realization that oh the reason why I'm working so hard and trying to get educated and successful and trying to make money and all these things is so that I could take care of my my current family My adoptive family but then also for if and when I have a family later we'll say when that um I'll be able to take care of them too in a way that I lacked when I was a kid um and that's what ultimately all of these things are for it's not just to whatever increase the the numbers on on my you know social media or on my balance or something like that so your background the life that you went through to where you ended up uh Air Force yeah Air Force Air Force US Air Force GI Bill Yale Cambridge PhD book you know going to be an amazing selling book all the rest of the stuff what do you attribute that trajectory to given that you're friends with so many of the people that you grew up with that are still they're the guy they're that guy with three baby mamas and a bunch of alimony or whatever and they're in the same town in the same whatever what was formative or what what do you attribute the change in you to that the other people didn't I mean there are probably you know there's a variety of factors I think one is um you know you you do need to have like a a certain amount of like innate drive or ambition in the first place and that I I'm not entirely sure you can you can you can drill that into people um so you have to have that sort of raw material in the first place but one point that I try to make in the book is that things could have very easily gone a different direction um I think having sort of aptitude and drive and ambition those are necessary but not sufficient that there are a lot of guys I think who are sort of smart and talented and ambitious but they're just surrounded by chaos and disorder and you know lack opportunity or or they've just been sort of beaten down by life so much that they don't even think to like spot the opportunities that are around you um and capitalize on them and so so that was there so I think some of the raw material was probably there um and then the other thing was just uh making this you know kind of halfway impulsive decision when I was 17 to just enlist and get out of my hometown and I kind of knew that you know I at this point you know I I'd had two jobs when I was in high school I was a dishwasher at a restaurant and then I was a bag boy at a grocery store and I kind of looked around at my co-workers who were a little older than me these were guys you know this kind of guy in their early to mid 20s you know maybe they like some of them like they were like 24 but had a girlfriend in high school and they were just like kind of creepy weird Stoner guy or the guy who you know would ride a dirt bike and you know just like smoke a lot of weed in the parking lot and just you know kind of aimless in a drift and I thought like I I think now when you're 17 or 18 that's kind of cool to live that life but when you're 24 or 28 like that's kind of pathetic and even when I was a teenager I had that thought that you know sometimes my friends and I would ask these guys to like get us beer hook us up with weed or whatever and you know some part of me I was I was like happy they were doing it but on the other hand I was like why are you doing this for us man like what kind of loser is hanging out with a bunch of high schoolers and I don't want to be like the weird old guy at the high school party when I'm that age um and so you know a variety of factors led me to uh just enlist right away I barely graduated high school I mean I I was smart and that that's the other point that I I try to make in the book is that a lot of people want to blame the school system or that there's something wrong with teachers or we aren't paying them enough and and maybe some of those things are true but teachers aren't dumb like that most teachers get into that profession because they care about kids and they want them to do well and they're usually pretty observant about like which kids are sort of curious and academically inclined and my teachers could see that in me but I just had no motivation or desire to do well in school it just wasn't there for me um and so my teachers were just you know uh continually frustrated by me and so yeah I enlist I get out of there basic training I get stationed I spend some time overseas and sort of have that structure uh around me uh a couple days ago I spoke with a a mutual friend of ours pulina Pomano and she asked me this question of when I read your book and I read about what you were like when you were a teenager when you were in high school and then I meet you now like it just doesn't like there's a disconnect I don't understand it and I explained that I was in the Air Force for8 years like that's a long time like I was in from 17 to 25 and you know the book I kind of like gloss over because it's it's kind of mind-numbing and boring but it's like you know make your bed you know like make sure your uniform is you know perfect and like every Pete is in boot camp exactly it it is kind of like that especially for the first six months to a year when you're in training it's like you're not a you're not a person you're just like a cog in this machine of just like you know what like cleaning and and and and being meticulous about every little aspect of your existence um and I hated it I hated every second of but it was it was important for me to go through that uh to like learn the skills that I kind of lacked when I was growing up of just like here's how to be an adult here's how to take care of yourself here's how to dress properly and like even basic things right what were the most surprising I I think this would be a nice framing actually As you move up through the kakaa sphere of different social strata what were the most surprising realizations going from Rob 1.0 to Rob 2.0 which is I guess from teenager to uh being in the Air Force what were the things where you're like oh my God like that's a an expectation or a social convention or that's a way of operating or it's a belief or whatever I mean I think probably one of the bigger ones was um like learning the distinction between like self-discipline and motivation uh because I I lacked I really lacked both when I was a teenager um you know I didn't feel MO at to do well but I also had I had no external discipline around me really I mean I had it in sort of fits and starts in different periods it was just a very sort of chaotic early life but I had no self-discipline certainly like I couldn't impose on myself it just you know I didn't I didn't have the the tools to do that but then in the military I learned it that you know at first it was imposed from on high that this is how you will do things and then it gets drilled into you and then you just learn on your own like oh this is how you get things done is motivation is you know so the the distinction the motiv is just a feeling it's like do I want to do this or not and if I don't want to do it I lack the motivation and I'm just not going to do it whereas self-discipline is I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel uh and so you know for for some people it may make sense in in the context of like going to the gym that I don't feel like going to the gym today but self-discipline is it doesn't matter how you feel like oh you have a feeling who cares like what are your actions what are you actually going to do now ignore those feelings and and do what you've set out to do and so it was like that for my work for things like I mean even showing up to work on time um I mean it's it's kind of sad but I was one of the better workers uh at my jobs in high school and even then I was like not on time half the time like it didn't matter I didn't feel like it and then the military was if you don't show up to work on time you get Court Marshal and you go to military prison like that's the life and once I learned like to to operate by those standards and those regulations those policies that it dawned on me that actually you know Joo has this phrase discipline equals Freedom that once you sort of Outsource all of your decisions to this sort of regimented system then suddenly like life gets better and you do have more freedom you have the freedom to think about other things or to uh direct your attention to certain projects or goals or ideas and you don't have to live your life in this constant state of chaos of oh I don't have any money now what you know like that you just you know set the set set the system so that your money goes here and this is what you're going to do when you go to work at this time and this is when you leave and this is what's and having that regimented system was really uh important for me and now I just you know I do it it's second nature to me but it took eight years to get there so yeah I think those those those kinds of things discipline was the big one what do people who didn't grow up in poverty not know about what it's like to grow up in poverty um I mean I think I think poverty poverty is it's an interesting question because I think a lot of people actually attempt to they attempt to imagine it I I know a lot of people actually who didn't grow up poor but who at least try to imagine what it would have been like to be poor um and I think like the the imagination probably isn't too far off from the reality that there are certain things that you want but maybe you can't get or if you want a a toy or certain food or a certain thing that you know I think poverty now for at least in sort of developed First World countries very few people are actually Starving in the street but it's more like you know I I want to get um you know maybe it's like a special occasion and I want to rent a video game at Blockbuster but that's $6 and we're only going to let you rent a movie because it's $3 like those kinds of like weird Small Things um and you can only go on a special occasion for your birthday or something it's not like a weekly uh currence um the other thing is like the I think like the the social environment is something people don't think about as well that what family life and communities look like in poor and working-class areas now are much different than than they than they used to look like I mean I cite this statistic in my book about how in the 1960s 95% of children in the US regardless of social class were raised by both of their birth parents and then by 2005 for the upper class it had dropped to 85% so there was a slight dip but by and large that's the norm still whereas for workingclass families in the US working-class children um it dropped from 95% to 30% and that was 2005 my guess is it's dropped a little bit further than that now um and so just to give a sort of a glimpse into this I mean there was I had five close friends growing up in high school and so there was me sort of raised in foster homes and adopted but there there were divorces and other kinds of drama uh I had two friends raised by single moms uh one friend raised by a single dad I had another friend who was raised by his grandma because his dad was in prison and his mom was addicted drugs and that's kind of like the normal situation when you go to like a if you go to a high school in one of these areas and just start asking people about their parents or their families they'll start describing about Dad's in prison or mom's in drugs or you know I'm staying with my aunt right now because my mom is in rehab or whatever chaotic yeah it's just total yeah it's just totally chaotic and disorderly and this is um that a point that I've made in my writing is that you know childhood poverty is not and again this is in the context of the US and you know First World countries that childhood poverty is not really very strong predictor of harmful or detrimental outcomes later in life um the correlation is either very weak or not significant at all between growing a poor and growing up to uh commit crimes or self-defeating behaviors harm violence um drug addiction unemployment all of these kinds of social pathologies there's a very sort of tenuous connection there but for childhood instability and those uh undesirable outcomes there's a strong and consistent uh correlation there uh and so childhood and stability is measured by things like uh you know were you raised by both of your birth par parents was there a divorce how many different adults moved in and out of your home how frequently did you relocate um basically how much day-to-day disorder was there in your life how much uncertainty was there and that actually does seem to have a very strong effect on the on childhood development on their expectations on their goals for themselves and and what's interesting is that when researchers control for childhood family income the link remains remains strong it remain significant between instability and outcomes and so one way to think about about this is um you know if if there's a rich family um but there's a lot of drama and chaos and divorce and addiction and domestic issues uh a child raised in that environment is much more likely to have detrimental outcomes more likely to commit crimes or become addicted to substances or um uh or just yeah have have issues CH you know children out of wedlock or multiple with multiple partners versus uh a child who is raised by two very low-income parents who are married who uh are very focused on creating a stable and secure life for their kids and you can kind of see this I think with like immigrant families and low-income families that uh haven't really been quite uh afflicted by a lot of the pathologies that have occurred in in the US um and so I think that's important to remember too it's that yes there's this poverty component but there's also just this kind of sometimes I wonder if poverty is even the right word for the way that I grew up I think squalor is probably a more accurate term is like yeah there was a bit of that material impoverishment it was more just people like living in a very um kind of ugly and almost like masochistic way of just you know uh careless and uh impulsive and you know sort of drug adult what's the mechanism that you think is causing that to happen what is it about it's so Universal that this uh unstable disorganized upbringing regard of class or material wealth M seems to have such negative impact predictively down what what do you think's the mechanism though I mean you know I probably some of it uh would be genetics but I'm not sold that it's people that people that are uh quick to anger externalizing Behavior as parents give the raw materials of externalizing behavior to kids right okay I think I think that's a like one one piece of it but I think that Robert Clan reign supreme exactly um and I think yeah that that would be the Robert pman answer um you know and but I I I do think that that that can't explain 100% of it because you know if you if you just so for example if you just look at white Americans over time like all of the same things have occurred across social classes that actually you know 50 60 years ago um I mean like I'll give you an example just for my adopted family so um my adopted family are basically white working-class people um on my mother's side and so my grandparents uh you know they were ra you know they they grew up basically during the Great Depression and they got you know they got married you know my my grandfather and my grand they would tell me this story about how my grandfather asked my grandmother to marry him and I think he was 18 or 19 and she was like 17 and she you know they were just like two the only two young people in this town and you know and she was like I'll marry you but you have to what is it you have to stop smoking stop drinking stop gambling and he was like done and done they got married and they had a 60 plus sex yes exactly well they yeah and then they had how many I think they had four or five kids yeah they had four kids yeah and um and they were uh married for 60 plus years no issues you I'm sure they had issues but like you know what I mean and then they had four kids all four kids divorced um and you know I just you know they they had Mar they did get married but then they ended up getting divorced you know some of them had you know kids step kids that kind of thing now I'm a member of the Next Generation and I'm seeing my cousins and it's like it's not even marriage it's just like oh like they hooked up and had a kid but he hasn't spoken to his kid in you know three years and you know so that's what it looks like now and I don't think the genetics in this family lineage changed much it was the social environment it's the incentives it's the denigration of marriage it's um and I don't even you know people will point to economic factors but my grandparents were very they were probably poorer than they're definitely poor than my cousins now you know like they could not afford the things that my same-aged you know 30-year-old cousins could afford um so it wasn't an economic issue I think a lot of it was just cultural uh what are your expectations I think a lot of it has to do with a lot of the stuff that you and I have talked about and you speak about on your podcast around incentives around sex and romance and dating and just um yeah uh in the 19 what is it the 1940s 1950s my grandparents generation it was like you know if you wanted to have sex you had to like live kind of life exactly and that was uh that was just the reality then and now it's um it's completely different and I've presented this thought experiment before I think I posted this on on back when it was still called Twitter which was if you traveled back to 1945 just got in a time machine and walked out in you know the post-war era and you said in you know very soon I think it was 1960 when the birth control pill was invented you say very soon there's going to be this magical technology the birth control pill um so contraceptives will be widely available abortion will be you know it'll be more accessible certainly than it is now um so you'll have you know the all of these reproductive options before you do you think in the future there will be more children born out of wedlock or fewer do you think that there will be more abortions or fewer do you think there will be more children raised in foster homes or orphanages living in chaos and squalor more or less and I think you know almost everyone that you speak to in 1945 you present this survey um I think almost every one of them would say less they would say fewer and then you know I but that's not the case it was very much the opposite of that that I think even these Technologies and you know and and the culture and everything sort of went in a in a very different direction than I think people had predicted Mary E came on the show and uh Adam and Eve and the pill Revisited a new version of her old book mhm fantastic just so great and it's true man like you know we look back and it's kind of cool in the red pill manosphere even in the EP world you know the social psychology world for people to almost laugh snigger at how rudimentary the thinking was in the 1960s that introducing birth control would result in better outcomes in terms of abortion better outcomes in terms of out out of loock births uh but who then would have been able to predict that that was what was going to happen you're talking like a fourth order effect right okay so you're going to decrease shotgun weddings because the onus is going to go from the male that accidentally impregnated to the woman who quote unquote chose right it went from a man's mistake to a woman's option and you go okay right and then and then what's going to happen to that and what's going to happen to that but it's like a it's so far down the line uh I was talking to Scott Galloway h and uh you know he was talking about the predictive power of stuff in the past and he was saying you know he'd looked through combed through some research about the Great Depression and had looked for anybody anyone predict this it's like the year before the Great Depression in the 20s no one nothing not not a Cassandra in sight and yet in retrospect you go how could no one have seen this coming you know hindsight hindsight is a wonderful thing with regards to that one one question I've got I think is kind of interesting is so squala your word uh up until the age of 16 17 17 up until the age of 17 that should set a pretty low honic threshold right that uh you're in a nice air conditioned room and your jeans fit and don't have holes in and you're not worrying about whether or not you can pay for the Uber to get from here to the airport how have you found your ability to um honic adapt over time like can you recall that as an anchor for your quality of life or does it almost seem like it's someone else that lived that that's oh that's an interesting question um I I guess it's it's a bit of both I mean it's so day-to-day I think I don't really yeah I don't really reflect in that way you know you just sort of live your life but when I reflect back and when I think about it and I realize you know there are those moments where like wow like I can do this thing that couldn't have done you know even even after I was in the I mean I think it's the pay structure has probably changed a bit but when I enlisted in 2007 I was you know I think the the I was making like $1,200 a month was the the pay and so I couldn't afford a belt you know like it was like small little things like that like you know once I cover you know CU I moved yeah once I moved off base I got this house with my friends but you know you have to pay like first yeah it's so funny now like it doesn't matter to me cuz I can you can I have money but back then it was like like like panicking is like you have to pay the first month and the last month's rent up front and then it's like the security deposit and then it's this and then you have to and then like gas to commute back and and all these kinds of things and calculating all of this and it's like oh well I guess I can't wear a belt for a couple of weeks until my next paycheck it's like that it sucks and uh and so you know so there are times like that where I'm like oh I could just buy this without thinking about it and that that part is nice um so I think it is that kind of um you know like happiness research will do this um what is it like uh they have terms for this it's like life life satisfaction versus um I think they may just call it happiness where like happiness is like your your actual affective state in the moment dayto day how much positive versus negative emotion are you experienc subjectively throughout the day or the week or whatever and then there's the life satisfaction component which is basically when you step back and view your life as a whole how satisfied are you and those two things are correlated but they're not quite the same in some ways I think parents often report much lower levels of happiness but higher levels of Life satisfaction yes and and I think in that regard it's like you know my happiness I don't know if it's actually changed much maybe there is a bit of that honic adaptation where you know 15 years ago it was like oh I can you know I can go to Wendy's cool like I'm happy whereas now it's um you know something else and but but ultimately that hasn't changed but the life satisfaction I'm sure is is much higher that like oh I've had a few accomplishments and I can afford things and I don't have to think about money as much anymore and so yeah I think there is that and yeah and also like reminiscing too like when I talk to my sister or some of my my old friends from high school and just sort of thinking about those days it's like you know I I do feel a bit better now about my life I was I was talking to a friend and uh they were asking me stuff about my childhood and my memory is really Patchy from my childhood it's not fantastic uh especially not sort of pre1 and um I said look like what what do you remember I said well I remember a good bit because of my sister because we'll prompt each other about oh do you remember that oh my God yeah we did do that thing and and we were in that car or we got stuck in the the mud or whatever right and um yeah there's a degree where I wonder how much is just one good chat GPT prompt away from uh me you know opening out into this really beautiful answer about some insight or whatever some experience that I had as a kid um but yeah George Mack my friend once a month lies in in bed before he wakes up for 10 minutes and imagines what it would be like to live with no arms or legs that's one of his favorite meditations among a a bunch of other weird ones so he's trying to dial up contrast as much as possible think about all of the challenges that I would have to face think about what this day is going to entail think about all of the things that would be difficult for me think about how grateful I would be if only I could just you know wash my own back if only I could brush my own teeth if only I could do these things so what he's trying to do is is give himself gratitude for the things that he takes for Grant Ed that are very normal now the interesting thing with your example is that you don't need to imagine what it would be like to live in squala MH because you did yeah but the way that our sense of self works you know what is it every seven years every cell in your body has turned over so there isn't even you're like the two ship of thes three three three ship of thesises away from the person that you were then and even for me now being in Austin for two years I went back home for Christmas and it's like it's kind of like a fever dream I'm being back in this place that I know so well but I'm different but I'm not and then I find triggers environmental triggers causing me to fall back into other different ways of thinking and stuff like that um so I was interested in whether or not basically you have been able to lock in a degree of gratitude uh like relativistic gratitude I suppose based on where you came from to where you are now but it's a permanent a permanent battle like in some regards from from a poverty perspective like you were a guy who was born with no arms or legs and then grew them yeah yeah I mean yeah those I think that yeah that's that's right where I where if I think about what it was like back then and I compare it to now of course like things are much better for me and yeah I mean it's it would be it would be I think shameful to be anything other than completely grateful and you know just full of gratitude for proud as well I would like to think yeah I mean that's a weird one like the like you know I think when that that's one of the things that you know in the book I point this out that like you know when you don't really grow up with parents and you don't really I mean because I grew up in foster homes before I think like that CR there's like the developmental window where if you don't really receive like positive feedback like I think I just like I receive compliments in a very weird way where it's like very hard for me to accept it it's a skill it's a real skill man who was it that I I gave someone a compliment [ __ ] I can't remember who it was I gave somebody a complimen mhm and I've never seen any I wish I could remember who it was but it would probably be a good idea that I couldn't call them out in any case dude it's like the worst way that I've ever seen anyone take a compliment just you know you say this thing that you think is a nice gift that you're giving somebody and even giving compliments is a skill that I've had to learn because doing something that's nice for somebody else is is a nice thing to do um ginda it was [ __ ] ginda it was on an episode that I did recently okay and uh I was like dude I [ __ ] I adore your writing I adore your substack you've got two bucks coming out I can't wait to read them I'm fired up every single time I speak you on the podcast I love it it's like a it's a Fugue State we drop into for two hours it's brilliant and I just saw his face people can go watch the episode and it's very it's very Charming like it's very Charming because obviously he's he holds himself to a high standard and stuff like that but you see this guy go like yeah thanks it's very it's very Charming um well the other day I had this this interaction with with one of my friends mothers and uh and you know she was like very high energy and she was like oh you know Rob I love your writing and now it's like I love your substack and I watch you on you know modern wisdom and it's like it's so great and at first I was like you know oh that's nice thank you you know trying to like change the subject I just like I feeling all these compliments and I just feel uncomfortable I'm like that's really nice of you thank you so much and she's like no really she's like did you really get a PhD from Cambridge cuz that's amazing and then like I started to walk away feeling like damn I feel pretty good about myself actually like you hang around all the time eventually I was like you know I I was suddenly getting this like really positive mom energy and I was like this is great like actually but it took a second right at first I was like you know just fell into that sort of default like oh very kind of you to say thank you so much and then she kept going with it and I'm like wow this is a really nice lady you're like a kind of the equivalent of of a really obesely overweight person who can't just go in the gym and do a little bit it's like hey we've got to shift 250 you need to stay on that treadmill for another hour mister you finish and you're like oh wow like exactly exactly there's like a crushing weight of compliments that you need but that's something I'd love I've got um who wrote no more No More Mr Nice Guy Robert Glover thank you I've got Dr Robert Glover coming on the show soon I'm very excited to speak to him and um I'd love to talk about the uh the skill of both accepting and uh giving compliments I think that that's a really underrated skill uh the the ability to give an Earnest compliment and to graciously but honestly receive it right skill that no one really ever talks about that is interesting yeah I think for it's at least my impression is it's actually easier to deliver a compliment than to receive way easier because you can be sincere about it like you can honestly show your appreciation if you enjoy something to tell someone but yeah I've I've yes seen this seems to be a common pattern that people have difficulty with with receiving them more so with guys maybe um than than girls although that's an interest that's an interesting one cuz with women for sure they they hide ambition uh they downplay success and stuff like that uh certainly female to female communication I think there is uh more opaqueness and more [ __ ] that goes on with regards to that if a guy thinks that you've done something [ __ ] they go dude that was lame whereas it might be couched in some other sort of language from a woman um yeah that' be interesting I'd love someone to look at uh sincere versus insincere compliments from comparing men and women that would be fascinating study this morning I was um I was prepping a newsletter it'll go out tomorrow uh you know I do like the three you know interesting findings everyone needs to go to Rob substack and subscribe I it's outstanding thank you man and I I shamelessly repurpose at least one thing every like couple of weeks I think like well the figh he deserved as as wide an audience as possible but this was an interesting one it'll go out um where so this was a study from 1988 I I'd be curious to see like I don't I couldn't find anything more recent but essentially they broke down by gender um the domain of of of where people deliver their compliments and so for women it was uh when women compliment women versus when men compliment men what are they complimenting for women it was mostly appearance it was like something like 60% of the compliments were about appearance and then it was like 15% about possessions and 10% about accomplishments and that kind of thing whereas so it was mostly appearance based for women when they're complimenting one another whereas for men it was mostly based on uh accomplishments uh most of their uh compliments to one another were about accomplishments and so one thing that I would wonder is like maybe it's um I wonder if it's kind of easier or or more difficult depending on so so I would imagine like for women when they receive compliments about their appearance because it seems to be the most common domain that they would receive those quite easily because they're used to it whereas for accomplishments that makes them feel uncomfortable in some way if youy if I go to you and I'm like dude you're looking buff like exactly tell me about tell me about how good my last newsletter was yeah yeah yeah yeah I wonder if like we would feel more uncomfortable when it's something other than than the typical Target that's so fascinating and yet again it shows just how people people's behavior zeros in on the most Salient parts of each sex's uh characteristics so women are complementing the most important thing to the opposite sex men are complimenting the most important thing to the opposite sex the same thing happens with derogation as well you know if there's an argument between a guy and a woman on the internet the woman's going to say he's got small dick energy and the guy's going to call her a slag right that's it it's like I'm going to derate your Chastity I'm going to derogate your sexual prowess I'm going to say that you're not as competent or as rich or as good-looking or as like uh successful as you think you are and I'm going to say that you're like fatter older and uglier than you are why well those are the most important things that you have with regards to social currency and these are the same people who will throw these sorts of insults around like you know Greta tbug accused Andrew Tate of having small dick energy like it's I think it's the third most liked tweet of all time or something like that I think she's I think she's in the top 10 twice and I think Tate features in the top 10 twice or three times and at least maybe one or two of those are his interactions with Greta tumberg so kind of I don't know like he's like the Michael Jackson to her Jan Jackson or something like very very successful when they get together yeah that is yeah like where I think that yeah the same people who would probably endorse like some form of gender blank Slade egalitarianism or deny that there are any sort of biologically based sex differences will still sort of Target those areas of inity it's the same as the Harvard Extension school thing right yeah yeah so yeah that's yeah so if um yeah if you're you know a very Progressive person but then a man is an knowing you online you'll immediately start telling him that he's you know a virgin or he's you know exactly [ __ ] incel like okay well inel yeah if you throw that debate around speaking of that uh Alexander daty just put a new study out did you see this one he hasn't released the details but he's capturing the data at the moment on it through a Google form and it's so funny he's put um videos up asking participants to rank the attractiveness of different red pill influencers okay so there's the guys from fresh and fit um uh uh who else is in there I don't know there's like a bunch of other people that are in there and uh it's got the replies are so funny I got to look at so it's on it's on Twitter like these these him mining for the dayri is on Twitter the results aren't he's he's he only put it out yesterday I think I got to look at this this is hilarious I dude I have to is he on there iess I'm not I'm not and he's not he went like more kind of like I don't know the big names within that world or whatever but um he is Alex has an ability I don't think I've ever seen you get into a spat on Twitter I don't think you've ever had it back and forth despite having like hundreds of thousands of people that follow you uh ginda likes to kind of he's more like a Hitman so he'll sit up on a ridge snip and look out and then he'll like fire something and it's like AOC it'll be like a single reply to AOC with 500 likes from him and then nothing he won't tweet for another week he honestly he pops he pops out of the Wilderness looks and he like adjust the site fires and then leaves um but I mean Alexander goes in with incel's in incel co uh that account that I think is the admin of the incels.co uh thing he's back and forth with like anyone like egg a non accounts like if he sees and you've got this essay and it's really well written but um his capacity he's kind of like the destiny of dating research you know he's just got this predisposition that's very good for being able to put up for anyone that doesn't know who we're talking about he's been in the show Alexander daty I think it's like Alex daty on on Twitter just look whatever day this goes out on look at who he's are going tweets and replies and have a look at how many people he's arguing with and I promise you there'll just be mountains M like tons and tons and tons and it's no it's nobody and then sometimes it's to somebody but yeah um I think he's performing a much needed service because I don't have the patience for that um I think like you know professors and researchers and podcast like just people who have like a million things to do and I think like but he he's he's doing it very well and he's building an audience this way and I think you know it's it's he's channeling his his knowledge and his research toward productive ends and you know I I think it it someone should be engaging with a lot of these like black pills you know these people high priced do you see that we got lumped into uh we we got given a name we did me you William Costello and Alexander daty and it's the academic manosphere okay good company I like it I think that's a that's a pretty good I was in there really yeah I think so I think you were it was a long time ago on this thing it was like maybe months ago and I did forgot to send it to you but yeah the academic the academic manosphere types it was used as a slur but I was like yo if you want this to be a make it less cool of a name like that's [ __ ] dope I would to be a part of the academic manosphere yeah yeah I got I got lumped in a couple of years ago with it was some like you know like someone was like trying to create like a league of the IDW this was back when the IDW was still I think I think it was still a thing where it was kind of on the way down it was like 2020 2021 um and yeah it was like in the minor leagues it was like you know there were Heavy Hitters you know Eric Weinstein it back then I I don't know what I had like followers or St they it was like that would been probably after your University of Austin thing maybe or around about that time it was before then even it was like you know I think you and I had just met and it was like still kind of early days and uh I was looking at this I'm like I don't want to you know like yeah I like some of the people who are were whatever I don't know if it's not really still a thing anymore but I like some of those people like I'm not really in this IDW thing like I thought it was kind of yeah so talking about you moving into the real you know upper Stratosphere troposphere of of class moving through your time in uh the Air Force what about when you got to Yale first and then Cambridge what was some of the conventions that really sort of stood out to you because I think this has informed a lot of your ability to sit back and and look at these Dynamics and go oh isn't that interesting because you have an anchoring bias to be able to compare it to you're like I saw this thing and then I saw this and then I saw that so I'm actually able to observe these Dynamics for what they are rather than kind of I get to see code rather than Matrix as opposed to have only ever grown up inside of the Matrix oh I see yeah yeah I mean I so yeah I red uh on campus 2015 uh as an you know mature student and uh Asian so looking like a normal age I think I had the beard back then so I had like a full beard you know so this is like a very common thing with vets where like cuz you have to shave every day mil and they like inspect you to make sure it's like it better be like this morning you shaved not last night kind of thing and uh and so as soon as I got I'm like you know [ __ ] sh months I didn't work out dude I think I gained like 20 lbs like it the first semester was bad where I was like I was like I don't have to work out anymore I don't have to sh yeah it was really nice and then like I know I like looked in the mirror like six months in I was like I got to Fig this is horrible um but the first six months it was glorious um and so but yeah I I looked older I was older and you know the students some of them would crack jokes about 21 Jump Street you know like that kind of thing thing and um yeah it was I think the first couple of months or so nothing really unusual but then I saw this very strange uh you know I mentioned before like witnessed the kind of birth of this new politically correct movement where a professor had written an email essentially defending freedom of expression on campus it later became known as the Yale Halloween Halloween costume controversy uh on campus where this was October uh the Yale Administration released this email basically telling the students to you know not engage in any cultural appropriation don't wear costumes that would be offensive to these groups and then uh one of the faculty members on campus basically wrote an email just to her students in her Residential College saying like do we really need the administration interfering in our lives like you're all adults I trust that if you wear things that maybe you don't other people don't like you guys can just work it out amongst yourselves essentially defending freedom of Express ression and in response hundreds of students marched around campus calling for her to be fired and later for her husband Nicholas Christus to be fired um saying that she was racist she was defending cultural appropriation these students claim they didn't feel safe on campus and they were using this kind of language uh which I think like now all of this stuff is kind of Spilled Out of the universities and we're all kind of familiar with all this sort of victimhood stuff but back then I was just completely like flumix that you know it was like we're in danger we you know they caused us pain suffering we're under immense harm uh you know this is like a emblematic of you know broader systemic forces that are working against and I'm looking at these students and like I know for a fact a lot of them were the sons and daughters of millionaires um I remember asking one uh young female student basically like can you explain like why is this offensive I don't understand and she basically told me I was too privileged to understand why you know why Erica Chris' email was offensive wow and you know she was like some white girl who like went to private boarding school that like grew up in a rich neighborhood and but she was an activist and whatever and so she was like kind of the is it the T titiana McGrath like that archetype uh except like you know went to Yale and everything and so um and that was like an interesting thing too was like on campus the whole identity politics idea was that if you are a member of these certain sociological categories then therefore you are conferred legitimacy to opine on all of the social ills of the world and how to fix them and so on but then the students also placed a great deal of importance on lived experience you know and if you live through something in your life then therefore you're able to speak about certain things you're an authority on those matters but those two things seem to be to me contradictory that you know does it matter what you live through in your life or does does it just matter like what you what category you belong to isn't it interesting that you had 17year Squall of legitimacy when it comes to lived experience but the number one thing which is ignored is class yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly and it was I mean is yeah they because there are so few people who had my kind of background on campus and because so few students and graduates of these kinds of universities ever encounter it it just isn't on their radar that they don't even think about I mean what's really interesting was that Yale is located in New Haven which is a really lowincome kind of blue collar town but you know they call it the Yale bubble where you know the students would only stick around in this very sort of you know enclosed area but I lived off campus uh in an apartment downtown and so I would walk through like a lot of poverty a lot of squalor a lot of addiction and you know having you know 20 minutes earlier heard some student talk about how they were oppressed and then I'd see you know real uh poverty and real suffering and it was just very difficult for me to sort of reconcile those things and eventually like At first I tried to be sympathetic and tried to understand these you know these these Grievances and the the students and the graduates and the faculty and all the you know and then eventually I was like these people have you know they they just completely don't understand they have no connection with it whatsoever and I'm some of it I think is legitimately malicious and duplicitous I would see for example people claim that investment Banks were emblematic of capitalist depression and say that you know these are just you know the horrible entities and then those same people would be at a recruitment session for Goldman Sachs like two weeks later and I think like you know that to me was like that was a calculated move like and what I mean by that is like you don't want to work for them yeah like if if they can basically eliminate their Rivals for these prestigious internships then all the better for them and so I think some of it was tactical and calculated but I think for a lot of people it's just um you know their hearts are in the right place or they're not really thinking that much about it um and so yeah this was uh yeah it was very strange and then and the other thing is so this is funny I um I I never knew my father growing up and I didn't know who he was or anything about him um and it was only recently I took a 23 in me and got the results and found that my father uh was Mexican and I went through I I called up our our mutual friend roseb Khan I was like hey can you look at this with me and like help explain he's like yeah your dad was like you know Mexican he's like indigenous from North America with some Spanish ancestry like that's like a perf he's like you grew up in La M like what did you expect and uh I was like okay so my dad was Mexican but so when I was at Yale before I had this information I was hanging out in a dorm room with some students and it was a friend of mine who was a Mexican guy and you know he he was not like a you know he wasn't an activist he wasn't like woke or whatever but I took a sombrero off the wall and put it on my head and he he was joking around but he said something like hey you know that's culture appropriation you can't wear that somero I was like oh my bad you know joking around and then once I got these results back I was like wait a minute I'm allowed to I could wear that some to wear some get me a poncho get me some fajitas and then and then the next thought I had was yeah but the next thought I had was like this just shows how like how stupid the whole thing is in the first place right like someone from my background who didn't know my father who could have been like I could have believe like if I had believed in the cultural appropriation thing I could have bought into it and now what am I supposed to think now that I have these DNA test results and then I you know just like the whole idea of like breaking people down into like these ethnic categories and they are or are not allowed to partake in this activity or that or the other um like when when there are people out there who actually don't know who their fathers are or don't know um they don't even know what cultural appropriation means I just think like our our attention and our resources and our time are spent on such such frivolous nonsense what is it the the tyranny of small differences what's that thing uh yeah the narcissism of small differ narcism of small differences that's it yeah yeah yeah that the smaller the differences between people the bigger that they're blown up to be when you have this relatively homogeneous group of people at Yale it's all to do with you can't speak to her like that it's like why like she's she's exactly the same as you just that one grandmother half African-American or something yeah yeah yeah and and everyone is from like the top probably the top desis of income I mean at Yale there are more students from the top 1% of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60% like almost everybody is either I mean and like yeah this is an interesting point that narcissism of small differences where a lot of the anger I felt was it was like between like someone at the 90th percentile income who they were angry at that 99th percentile right like you know whatever like someone from a family of whatever doctors and lawyers who are sort of upper middle class who are angry that the children of billionaires get to do something a little more expensive or a little bit more you know they get to go on a more expensive vacation or you know like all of that was was very much confined with people who are extremely affluent and welltoo and then there were you know a handful of people like me I mean I I'm the only one who had like the kind of life that I had but I knew some people from more kind of blue collar backgrounds the underclass bonafides yeah yeah exactly who are really just kind of like lower middle class Blue Collar but not not like I mean it's the thing is like the way that the system works is I think we might have talked about this last time about just how few people um like only less than 3% of foster kids graduate from University less than 3% um and you know people who are from the bottom income quintile it's it's 11% and so you know really there are more you're four times more likely to graduate from college if you're poor than if you live through the Foster system I mean that's just how you the odds are so stacked against you and so yeah I mean even the people I knew who so I think I was one of like eight veterans on campus you know people think of the military as like oh kind of like people who maybe didn't go to college or people who had maybe sort of a more Hard Scrabble life um which is maybe to some extent true compared to people who go to expensive colleges but I was so I was one of eight military vets on campus but even when I would interact with the other vets uh enlisted vets um in my cohort so there were yeah eight in my cohort and I would I would speak with them I was like oh like basically all of them were raised by two parents and like you know had a mom and a dad who did prioritize education and who you know kind of said good examples and you know all of those things and I think yeah we focus a lot on I think the left focus is a lot on economics I think certain strands of the right will focus on behavioral genetics but there is this sort of cultural component here too that people don't really seem to to want to touch at some point I will write write this this this post up about sort of the the limitations of sort of overextending the findings of of behavioral genetics I think like it's an important thing to to know and to understand and to sort of be fluent in but also to to not discount the role of good habits Customs sort of good good behaviors I wrote this post um nobody's a prisoner of their IQ and I think that's an important uh piece too that it's true that the guys I grew up with regardless of their parenting or whatever uh their economic conditions were they probably weren't going to be um in a position to go to a very expensive you know selective University but I think if they had been maybe taught different uh values and inculcated different habits that you know two of them wouldn't have gone to prison one of them was shot to death uh friends working sort of meal low-income jobs I mean that's the sort of typical outcome of people in that community and I don't think like maybe we can't necessarily raise the ceiling for some people we can definitely raise the floor I think yeah and so the last one of the last episodes I did in this room was with Destiny and he prompted this idea that I named two-step potential Theory which is a blending of individual agency with real world limitations your efforts have tons of control over your outcome within the range that your world's limitations will allow behavioral genetics teaches us that on average around 50% of everything that we are psychologically is inherited from our parents boo 50% of our outcomes are limited by our genetics yes but that also means that 50% of them are up to you which is great this is another reason to not only compare yourself to who you were yesterday not to who someone else is today but it's also a reason to try lots of things until you find the intersection of something that you love and something that you're good at and um yeah it's like you can imagine that you have a bracket within which your potential sits mhm and that bracket is determined very heavily by outside forces it's genetic predisposition its life circum ances it's nutrition it's upbringing it's [ __ ] unconscious trauma it's all the epigenetics it's all of that stuff but your position within that window is almost exclusively on you now that window also determines your ability to deploy your efforts right but that just moves the window that doesn't move you within the window Yeah well yeah James CLA has this nice line in atomic habits about how certain people become so preoccupied with their genetic limitations that they never try to actually reach them I love that yeah it's it's incred right that and I think people understand this at least in the context of like physical fitness right it's like well I'm never going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger so I'm just not going to go to the gym which is like a completely uh misguided way to think about things um but yeah I like this like yeah that that line about sort of behavioral genetics but then also there is individual agency involved and you do have some control over this I mean I even I just wrote this post about melli and how um in the discourses on Livy he writes about uh how you know he basically says God doesn't want to do everything he's like some of it is up to you you this he was in a much more religious time than we are uh living in Italy and C you know Catholic Florence and God doesn't want to do everything but then but then he says you know basically 50% of your outcomes are due to Fortune 50% of your outcomes are due to your own individual efforts and Fortune will favor you if you take action these kinds of things there's a there's a political philosopher Harvey Mansfield who actually suggested that this this transition uh indicates that makell may have been an atheist because at first he starts out saying God doesn't want to do everything and then he starts saying 50% is fortunate and 50% is you well where does that leave room for God and mlli may have been sort of subtly indicating to the reader that you know you can talk about God you can think about God but ultimately it's going to be luck and it's going to be you and that's all you have could have got his percentages wrong yeah or exactly yeah so one of the things I looked at your end of your review that you did and that actually reminded me that I hadn't done mine uh as in the breakdown of what were the 10 I think he did the 10 most read free articles and paid articles which will still be up on your website and people can go and check that out and that prompted me while I was back home in the UK that [ __ ] I haven't done mine for modern wisdom so thank you for that um but the best read article that you had last year was one called how I read yeah and there's this great screenshot from talb in there talb says the opposite of reading is not not reading but reading something like the New Yorker I love that line so much what do you think he means by that um you know TB is so that you know there a screenshot from Twitter I think there's you know there is the sort of Twitter TB and then there's the the author there's different you know there's different versions of him but I the way that I interpreted that you know the contener tweet from TB was that um you know if if reading is defined as you know consuming useful important Timeless information uh than you know reading you know the sort of hot takes in you know like Legacy Media institutions you know often you know colored by bias colored by the ideologies of our time that you know that's actually the opposite of getting useful you know important Timeless information you're getting sort of unuseful unimportant uh timely you know relevant maybe in the moment and then tomorrow people for will forget all about it and so I think that's kind of what he meant here um and you know to be fair like I I I wrote in there that I do enjoy reading the New Yorkers sometimes but but not as much as I enjoy that tweet yeah yeah yeah yeah what's your advice for people who want to become better readers uh I mean it's a it's a habit you know I've been sort of sort of you know touching on this on this uh idea of discipline of habit of agency and I think it's it's similar to a gym routine right where when you're starting out it's it's difficult it's um you know sort of building it into your schedule but then once you get going um it becomes much easier to just sort of set it and forget it that you know from these hours from this time of day I'm I'm you know I'm going to the gym and here's the workout and here's the routine and now you don't have to think about it anymore that sort of discipline equals Freedom idea um and so I did that with reading I've really been kind of a on and off reader since I was a kid um I taught myself how to read in the foster homes and then reading became this kind of uh like the soothing experience for me that I could sort of you know disconnect from the world and learn about information and yeah yeah exactly and so I would do that um um and so it's always been a sort of a companion for me but you know with with you know everyone gets busy everyone has a million things that they have to do they have work they have obligations but for reading yeah it really does you really have to treat it like a gym routine or like a job or something like an important habit set time aside every day and so this is what I was doing in in grad school was you know first thing in the morning I'd have my cup of coffee and I try to read whatever you know five pages 10 pages 15 pages whatever it is um if people don't really have the reading habit at all I do like James clea's idea of like start from like the lowest unit of effort possible like sentence yeah sentence yeah yeah I mean it would be really weird if you started from the word level but yeah sentence level or a paragraph level you know ideally you could get a page in uh you know something substantive um and then build your way from there uh whether it's a chapter whether it's a book and so on and I think yeah breaking it down in that way is helpful because you know I speak to some people who want to read and they're like okay I'm going to try to finish this book this week or I'm going to try to finish this book this month and I think like thinking in those terms isn't really helpful I think you have to break it down further of instead of a book a month I'm going to read three pages a day or 10 pages a day and then you'll finish the book when it gets finished um the other thing is if a book is uninteresting to you or it's not holding your attention to just let it go you know it's fine you don't have to read it just because you bought it or because you rented it from the library or what have you it's because everybody else says that it's good or because you read on Twitter that It's really informative or you want to tell other people that you've read it that they've read it as well right and yeah you don't I mean that's one of the that was one of the things that I learned too was um you know a lot of people a lot of the sort of chattering class people they will not read the books that they claim to have read but they'll read reviews and so if you want to just like know about a book to participate in a conversation just go read three or four reviews online uh and that'll sort of give you the highlights of what people are talking about or what what the takeaways are that people care about from the book but if you really want to do a deep dive if you really want to understand a book then yeah you have to read the whole thing cover to cover but you know take it slow do what you're comfortable with if you want to skip around that's fine too that if a particular chapter title sticks out at you or seems to be especially provocative or interesting start with that chapter first and then you can go back I would recommend for most books especially most older books to actually read the um the preface the you know author's note the forward because for a lot of sort of older texts you know I mentioned Mak Val earlier you know it it does help that those you know the the the prologue and all those kinds of things they will sort of contextualize the book and sort of explain to some degree why is this book important why do people care about it what's been the sort of commentary a summary of of this author's influence throughout the centuries and so I do recommend reading that and not just skipping to chapter one um and yeah I mean there there are other things too that um you can read multiple books simultaneously there's no rule in place I think we learned from school that one book at a time you know read this and hear the the formula for how you read um but actually you can do whatever you want skip around read two pages of this book put it down you know take a week off read this other book for a while I'll do that when I'm on vacation I'll just start a new book even if I'm working on three other books back home I'll just pick up a new book off the shelf and go on vacation and that'll be my vacation book I do weird things like that and for me it's helpful um and and the other thing is it's helpful to take notes too um whether it's in the book itself people get mad at me sometimes on Twitter they're like oh you're defacing that book like oh [ __ ] bought it my book ex exactly yeah it's not like I'm vandalizing you know it's there's a there's a really good book um called how to read a book called Mortimer Adler by Mortimer Adler and um he's um he was a professor at the University of Chicago uh in the mid mid late 20th century but he wrote this book basically like explaining the different forms of reading the different types of reading and this is where I picked up a lot of this information about it's okay to skip around what are your goals for reading um Break Down The Habit but one of the points he's made is that no one M he he makes this analogy he says no one mistakes the uh what do they called in in in the composers of music like the sheet the sheet music or something no one confuses that for the melody itself right it's like no one's you know it's not the paper is not sacred the ideas on them are sacred and most authors would be flattered if someone was so invested in the book and the topic that they're engag their own [ __ ] yeah and the marginalia like yeah I mean it's it's you see this with like if you visit museums you know Cambridge they have like Darwin's notes or his scribblings of other people's texts and you can see like he was reading and he was making notes and and he was doing this in a time where uh it was actually harder to get books than it is now um and so engage with the book um try to understand what the points are in the book don't just I mean this is something that I used to do even though I was a reader I didn't really I didn't really um try to understand what the book was about before I started it it was like oh here's an interesting title and I'd read the back of it and it would be oh it's about XYZ and I okay I'll just start reading it and sort of fumble my way through rather than think about okay where's this author coming from what point is he trying to make uh why is this book important try to take that sort of metal level perspective as well so that you can really understand where he's coming from and break down the points if you really want to um especially for more modern social science books one thing you can do is essentially just read the first and last chapter or the preface in the last chapter because you know that's just the way that's just a style of reading or style of writing now where you know Publishers want you to just basically summarize the idea at the beginning and the end for busy people for tired people what's this book about you know like what are you going to talk about and then at the end say here's what I talked about and that'll sort of give you you know maybe 50% what a funny hack that's so funny what about uh revisiting things because you're recall seems to be quite impressive which is something that people want they want to reading something and then not being able to recall what you read is kind of in some ways like not having read it at all yeah well I think taking notes highlighting and then what I'll do is like you know I'll have like a Google doc or some kind of uh notetaking app where I'll like cut and paste if it's like Kindle version or if it's the paper version I'll sometimes I'll just post it on Twitter um and then that'll be like the search function where I can find it later um or I can um yeah I'll just you don't get deleted from Twitter would it's not the access to the audience it's my own arive of my notes exactly that would be that would be rough yeah yeah um and so yeah so I think that sharing it in that way and that's actually how my Twitter started was me just sharing notes and things I was reading that's like how the initial sort of growth occurred was you know I was in I think it was in undergrad when I started it in yeah 2017 um posting my notes online and my highlights and underline and um and so yeah I think like pinpointing the interesting points doing like a very brief summary even it's literally one sentence preferably a paragraph if you finish a book like what did you get from this book what are two or three things that you remember right now having just finished readit because if you if you have just finished reading a book the most important or interesting or provocative points will be at the top of your mind just try to paraphrase it don't even go back to the book and say well what did he actually say try to say what did I remember type it out try to use that that forced recall and that'll help to um to to sort of get it into longterm memory and then every once in a while like if I'm flying on a plane or if I'm you know in waiting in line or something usually I'll read a book but sometimes I'll actually just revisit my notes and say you know what did that book say or what was that point and do like a control F if I just want to read about what mating psychology or what have you I'll just do the the control F and okay here are my notes on mating Psychology from David bus or this book or that book and that'll help me to just sort of connect the dots and and uh and and also help to provide material for my substack which is most important obviously Rob I appreciate the hell out of you it's very good to speak to you again I'm so happy that this book's finally out it's taken forever yeah it's been five years plus yeah and the making yeah that this has been going and then it's been ready to be published for a good while as well and you've been sort of held at the starting line so where should people go they want to check out the book The substack the everything else what um yeah they can get my book troubled uh a mem care family and social class that's you know wherever wherever books are sold and yeah follow me on Twitter robk Henderson subr henderson.com hell yeah thanks Rob thank you Chris if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe