Rob Henderson on Life in Foster Care, Academia, and Beyond

This week on Upstream, I sit down with psychologist and author Rob Henderson to discuss his new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. There were some connection issues during the recording of this episode, so So our voices crossed paths a few times, but the conversation is excellent nonetheless. Please enjoy. So Rob, you've, you've just written a memoir about how you grew up in foster care in LA, enlisted in the military at age 17, and then how you then went on to go to Yale and Cambridge. Why did you tell the story and what do you hope that people take from your book?

Yeah, yeah, thanks, Erik. I mean, it's like, objectively speaking, you know, it's not like a particularly I don't know. Sometimes I have these self-conscious doubts, like, is this really that interesting of a story? Because like, yeah, okay, getting into Yale is not that likely. Getting into Cambridge, I mean, it's not that likely, but these are places people go and it's not that interesting. I guess what makes it interesting is like where I came from and how unlikely that was to go from where I came from. I cite some stats in the book. You know, only 3% of foster kids ever graduate from college. It's extremely unlikely to go to college in general as a foster kid. But then Going on into the kinds of environments that I was in later in academia is even more unlikely. I think I've met one foster kid in the last 8 or 9 years at these kinds of institutions other than me. So it's just very rare. I wanted to write the book just to give, you know, the book-reading, educated public some sense of what life is like, you know, in these kinds of environments, in foster homes, Later, I was adopted into this working-class family in this blue-collar area in Northern California called Red Bluff. Uh, the kinds of— I spent quite a good deal of time dwelling on the lives of my friends too. They weren't in foster care, but they were raised in kind of typical, uh, sort of working-class, kind of marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds. Single parents, raised by grandmothers, raised by people other than their 2 birth parents and what the sort of modal outcome is for someone like that. These stories don't seem to get told that often, and I wanted to just sort of give readers a glimpse of what that life is like. I also, you know, there's a good deal of attention paid to social mobility. What are the factors that predict upward mobility? How do we get more kids into college? A lot of focus on inequality and poverty and how to solve these social ills. And a point that I wanted to make in this book is that, like, you know, there's a lot of discussion about economics and education, but there are other, you know, there are other questions beyond that— culture and family and, and developing the kind of inner resources as a kid in order to believe in yourself enough to even capitalize on opportunities that are put before you. You know, a point I make repeatedly in the book is that, you know, the raw ingredients for someone like me to go to college were always there. But I was just so weighed down by all of these forces around me, not necessarily economic either, not just because of money, but because of other factors— instability and neglect and all these other things that people are very— they shy away from discussing. So I wanted to illuminate some of these, some of these phenomena.

Why don't you explain some of these phenomena that you think are pretty subtle or insidious, but, but just, just as important and not being treated or respected as part of what's holding some people back?

Right. Yeah. So there are a variety of different factors, but one thing that comes up consistently— so when you look at the research in developmental psychology, I think it overturns a lot of the popular sort of widely held beliefs about what factors in childhood predict success or you know, undesirable outcomes in adulthood. And so when researchers look at, for example, if they measure the link between childhood poverty and future likelihood of committing crimes or becoming addicted to substances or, you know, dropping out of school, basically poverty either has no link whatsoever or the correlation is very tenuous. It's much weaker than people would expect. However, when researchers look at childhood instability and the relationship between childhood instability and undesirable outcomes, again, substance abuse, dropping out of school, likelihood of committing crimes, that is a strong and significant predictor. And so childhood instability is measured by things like frequent relocations, divorces, separations, how frequently adults or people are moving in and out of your home, how frequently you move to different homes. Just day-to-day chaos and uncertainty. And, you know, I took that childhood instability scale when I first learned about it when I was in grad school, and I scored well into the top 1% of most unstable homes in the US. And, you know, the childhood poverty piece, I think that's just— there's too much focus paid on that, that we are so reluctant to talk about having predictability, of having reliable caregivers, of having parents who put their children's needs before their own. And I lacked that, you know, kind of consistently throughout my childhood when I was in the foster homes. I mean, there was a period where I was changing home or changing homes every few months, changing schools even more frequently than that. And there was a period where my foster parents and the social workers responsible for my case thought that I might have had a learning disability. And, you know, at the time, you know, I didn't, I didn't have any sophisticated thoughts about it as a little kid. But in hindsight, it's just kind of amazing that. No one considered that, oh, well, maybe that, you know, moving this kid around every few months, changing schools all the time, and the fact that he has no adult that he can truly rely on for support might have some effect on his academic progress or how focused he is in school. It was just, oh, he's not performing well and he's getting into trouble and he just isn't doing very well. So we're just gonna immediately jump to some kind of medical diagnosis. So maybe it's ADHD or maybe he has a low IQ or. you know, something like that. And maybe those are factors, but no one wanted to consider that actually the foster system is really, um, disruptive to a kid's development. And, and even, yeah, no one wants to talk about that. And of course, I think some people would hear that and, you know, they immediately want to jump to, well, maybe the foster system needs more funding, or maybe the schools, maybe the teachers need to be paid more. And maybe those— maybe the answer to those things is yes. But also, uh, how does the kid feel subjectively? What's their firsthand sort of Subjective experience. How safe do they feel? Do they feel like they're, like they're, they're invested in their own education? And do they have people looking out for them and make sure they're doing homework? And there's a line towards the end of the book that I say, um, going to class every day is not as important as having a parent that makes sure you go to class every day. And that's the piece that I think, uh, that we're, we're often missing in these discussions about poverty and inequality and upward mobility.

And so someone listening to that may say, oh, how do we, how do we solve for that? But one of the things that you write in your intro is upward social mobility shouldn't be our priority as a society. Instead, it should be a byproduct. Why don't you unpack that a bit?

Yeah, well, I just think that like the people who set education policy and the people who, you know, the chattering class, the people who sort of dictate the discourse, they tend to be people who are very good at school. You know, they tend to be nerds or people who, you know, take a lot of pride in their education and in their resumes without really thinking about, you know, is this actually like a worthy goal for people? Should everyone follow this same path? And, you know, we— what, you know, there's that— what is that phrase? Like, what gets measured gets managed. And so we just— it's an easy way to sort of tick that box of did someone graduate college or not? And if not, then how do we— fix that or improve that without really thinking about the factors underlying it. And upward mobility, it's fine. It's a laudable goal, getting more kids into college and getting kids into higher-paying jobs. But one point that I try to make throughout the book is that conventional badges of success do not suddenly heal the, you know, extremely upsetting experiences from early childhood that, you know, even if every single kid who grows up very poor or in a foster home or in some kind of deprived or dysfunctional environment, even if every single one of them gets a degree from an expensive college and earns a comfortable upper-middle-class income and gets a nice house and everything, you know, on paper they're, you know, they're successful. Um, that doesn't suddenly make everything okay. Everything they went through prior to those achievements doesn't make it okay. And so, so there's kind of 2 pieces there. On the one hand, it's, you know, we're focused on upward mobility and we're focused on the wrong things in order to achieve it. Uh, you know, again, the culture and the family piece. But then on the other hand, is upward mobility even the most important goal we should be striving for? Uh, we should actually be focusing on what happens before age 18 rather than after? What is the kid's experience like? Are they happy? Do they feel safe? Do they feel secure? Did they have a decent childhood? I think that's an important piece as well. I mean, I just had this conversation. One thing that I wasn't expecting, Erik, when I was writing this book, just how many affluent or upper middle class people would connect with this book. And what I'm finding is like a friend of mine the other day said he read the book and he, you know, he went to an expensive college. He's doing very well in his life. But he was telling me how his whole life growing up, all his parents cared about was that him and his brother would get into an Ivy League college. That's all they cared about. And so, you know, they were very cold to him and his brother. And every single decision they made was just sort of openly, will this get you into a good college or not? And that was sort of, you know, pervasive throughout the family was just every decision, every class, every extracurricular was just optimized for college. And so he did go on to be very successful, but he says, like, looking back on it, he was very unhappy. He felt very lonely. He felt like kind of disconnected. He feels sort of ambivalent about his, his family. And, you know, I think like in many ways, you know, he told me like he probably would've preferred having a closer relationship with his mom and dad and maybe not going to such an expensive college and living out his family, his parents' dreams. And maybe, you know, maybe on paper he would've been earning less or went to like a less highly ranked college, but the idea of like being closer with his mom and dad may have, you know, more than made up for that. And so I think we're just sort of, you know, aiming for the wrong targets oftentimes.

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Well, I mean, I think that we could, we could do a better job of emphasizing, you know, I mean, it's funny, like kids don't have any political power whatsoever, right? Like they can't vote. They can't— like, I'd imagine if you put a vote to kids, you know, this is pure speculation, but my guess is like, you know, if you ask kids to explain what no-fault divorce is and then say, should it be outlawed, I'd imagine a lot of kids would actually You know, but they don't have the ability to vote, right? It's like they have no power for how their family should should go or what family policy should look like or education policy. So they just kind of have to live with the preferences of adults. I quote Nicholas Christakis, this the Yale sociologist and physician. You know, he he wrote that you know basically every single decision about child welfare and child outcomes in the U.S. have been dictated by adults, and what was best for kids was. of secondary or, or, or not even considered at all. It's all about sort of what, what do adults want for themselves rather than what would be best for their families or for their kids. Um, I mean, I think on a smaller level, people who have sort of cultural influence, you know, who, who work in the realm of ideas, could sort of emphasize, you know, there, there are better and worse environments for kids. Melissa Carney wrote a great book recently, The Two-Parent Privilege. You know, I think having discussions like that can definitely contribute. I can give a small sort of anecdotal example. I've spoken with 2 people recently who read my Substack and who read some of the stuff that I've written. And both of these 2 people, they are, you know, successful people, but they were both explaining how they were having kind of, you know, they were— their marriage was kind of rocky and there wasn't any like abuse or mistreatment or anything, but they were just kind of getting bored and they were kind of unhappy. Things weren't, you know, going in the direction that they'd hoped. But then they read something that I'd written and instead of you know, going towards the direction of separation or divorce, they decided to actually work on their marriage and communicate with their partners. And one, one person said that, you know, him and his spouse, they decided to go to couples therapy because they had small children and they wondered like, is this going to be good for my kids? And then they read something that I wrote and reconsidered. And so I wondered if, you know, if that was sort of scaled up and instead of, you know, to be frank, every time you open some like prestige media outlet and anytime there's a question of marriage, often it's like either, either questioning it or trying to undermine it or ridicule the whole institution. If instead we tried to shore up support for it and confer, you know, more, more status to it and, and, and recognize more of its importance in the context of children. I mean, if there's just 2 adults and there's no kids involved, you know, you can do whatever you want. But if there's small kids involved, to actually sort of consider what will be the long-term effects on them.

Yeah, it seems like there is this, um, concern in the culture that if you celebrate motherhood, uh, that takes away from celebrating careers, that careerism, and that there is this— Yeah, yeah.

Not the opposite, right? Like if you celebrate a very successful, accomplished, you know, female senator or CEO or something, no one's accusing you of denigrating mothers, right? But if you celebrate motherhood, suddenly people feel exactly as you said, which I think is interesting.

One pushback to the celebrating of motherhood at the expense of sort of female careerism is people say, hey, if you have people outside of the workforce, that has real effects on the economy today, right? Women, you know, contributing to the workforce increases GDP. And so it's worth just acknowledging that there is even a trade-off to encouraging more women to be, to be mothers. But I wonder if it's, it's a trade-off between current and future GDP, because, hey, if we have, you know, more careerist mother— more careerist women, that means, you know, less kids, and that means less people down the line. And so maybe that's one way of thinking about the trade-offs on purely just economic terms, not Of course, there's all sorts of other cultural and downstream impacts from a society where women are less— or mothers are less celebrated because, you know, careerists are more celebrated.

Yeah, that's, that's an interesting point. I mean, where I thought you were going, and I think, yeah, that's important, that sort of long-term versus short-term GDP. But where I thought you were going was sort of, you know, similar direction, this sort of cost-benefit analysis of, You know, like, because you're speaking kind of about the sort of, you know, upper middle, upper class like that, that, you know, if a mother with an expensive degree decides not to work, in some way the economy is losing something there. But I'm thinking more about sort of the blue collar, sort of more working class and poor that, you know, when kids are raised in sort of single parent homes or chaotic environments, the likelihood of those kids becoming addicted to substances or becoming homeless or going to prison, that costs the economy money. And so, you know, we're also, you know, basically when kids are raised in chaotic environments, you know, on the one hand, you know, you could invest in women and get them to work and so on and so forth. But more broadly speaking, if you're undermining marriage and you're downplaying the importance of family and stability for kids, it looks very different at the other end of the spectrum for, uh, for more sort of working class and poor kids, uh, and what their lives are like as adults. I mean, I had 5 close friends growing up. None of us were raised by both of our birth parents. And of those 5 guys, 2 of them did go to prison and one of them was shot to death. And, you know, the others are kind of working like menial jobs and, you know, kind of getting by. But I do wonder, like, if they had had more stable, more secure early lives and better influences and better mentors and, you know, yeah, factors around them that maybe they would have been sort of more, you know, if we're speaking in the cold language of economics, they may have been sort of net contributors rather than net, uh, you know, the term I'm looking for. But yeah, yeah, net costs.

Yep. It seems like one of the big contributions of your book and your work is introducing class, um, to a society that only thinks about, uh, race and gender, uh, differences when it comes to, say, dynamics at, uh, at university. For example. And one of your big contributions to the sort of intellectual culture, one of the biggest ideas I think in the last few years, Marc Andreessen has said, and I agree, is this idea of luxury beliefs. And for our audience who may not be familiar, can you briefly unpack this concept and how it might relate to, or some examples?

Yeah. So I coined this term luxury beliefs when I was in grad school doing my PhD. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a key component of the luxury beliefs framework is that the believer of the luxury belief is often sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. And so, you know, there are different examples of the luxury belief phenomenon. I mean, there's, there's sort of sociological concepts that support it. I trace the idea back to Thorstein Veblen, who wrote this book at the turn of the 20th century called The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen's key insight was that back then, 100-plus years ago, most of the affluent members of society exhibited their status. They performed their class through expensive material goods, luxury goods, through top hats and evening gowns and pocket watches and monocles and attending lavish and expensive events. It was very sort of materially driven performance of class. By the mid-20th century, this sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote a book called Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. And most of his observations were sort of— he was French. And so a lot of his observations were about his countrymen in France and how the affluent of his society displayed their status. But a lot of it translates. I mean, it's easily recognizable. So one of his points was that people will convert their economic capital into what he termed cultural capital. So he coined this term cultural capital, which is essentially people will take their, their money, their material resources, and they'll convert it into sort of behaviors and customs and habits, intricate and expensive tastes. So, you know, at that time in the mid-20th century, it was sort of learning the subtleties of different vintages of wine or different styles of artwork or music. And so my claim today is that luxury beliefs have, to a large extent, replaced luxury goods. They have— they're basically the latest expression of cultural capital, that when you express a luxury belief, you are, you know, you're communicating that you went to a certain kind of school, that you hang out with certain kinds of people, you consume certain kinds of— you have the kind of job where you can keep up with the latest sort of intellectual fashions and trends and political views. I mean, one example would be the defund the police movement. So 2020 and 2021, this idea of defunding the police suddenly became very popular among the chattering class, the luxury belief class. And it, you know, it makes you sound interesting and sophisticated. It's counterintuitive, right? Like, there's this great book from Michael Knox Barron called Wasps, and he writes about the ruling class of America, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. of the mid-19th to the mid-20th century and how, you know, often many, many, uh, what he terms the high WASPs of that era would intentionally, uh, support certain fashionable views specifically because they would upset the masses. They enjoyed this idea of what he termed the vulgarians getting upset because, you know, the WASPs held the, you know, something in opposition to what was conceived to be conventional at that time. And so this is kind of an example of that, of, oh, the, the sort of you know, median American voter likes police. Well, one way for me to distinguish myself and show that I'm not a member of the unwashed masses is to say we should defund the police. And in a way, you're also sort of signaling that you are, you know, you're so safe and secure, uh, that if there were no police, you would, you would not, you would be unharmed by it. Um, so there's a sort of costly signaling component. And so, and we saw this, that crime skyrocketed across the US. Most of the victims of the crime were poor people. And, you know, non-white sort of marginalized communities were the ones who were suffering the most in the wake of the defund the police movement. And, you know, there was— there were reports of, you know, people in affluent Chicago neighborhoods hiring off-duty cops or security guards. People in New York were fleeing to the Hamptons during the riots in 2020. And so, yeah, by and large, you know, sometimes they do catch kind of a, you know, they do catch a stray bullet, so to speak. There was a— there was a tech entrepreneur, I think, somewhere here in California, somewhere in SF, Someone did get like stabbed or something, and and that made front page news ironically enough. Right? That was something that people were actually talking about when you know when when the peasants kill each other, that's one thing. But when an aristocrat gets killed, suddenly we all have to you know suddenly it's taken seriously, and we all start talking about it on social media, and the the mass media reports on it, and and you know the person gets identified by name. We also saw this with those two journalists. This was uh uh. Last year, 2 different journalists were killed. And yeah, they were like identified by name and had like entire pieces written about them and their activism and all this stuff. And I thought like, it's so interesting because a lot of people died like after the defund the police movement took effect and police departments did have their funding reduced. Or the, you know, in addition to the political impact and the policy. It also just cultivated this general attitude of suspicion and mistrust around law enforcement such that, you know, police departments are struggling to recruit officers. They were retiring in large numbers. And a lot of the existing police officers are just sort of a little bit more wary of acting because they know that if someone catches something out of context on their smartphone, that their career is over. And so just generally, it's a bit more lawless now. And And yeah, a lot of this was due to this defund the police luxury belief.

And so you have 2 other posts that connect to this idea. One is, be wary of imitating high-status people who can afford to countersignal, and why dumb ideas capture smart and successful people. Why don't you unpack the main ideas here?

Yeah, I wrote that. Well, it was originally, I think I wrote it in 2021, but I sort of repurposed it for my Substack recently. This idea. And one, I guess, like one recurring question I got after I coined the luxury beliefs idea and started writing about it and speaking about it, you know, people would say like, well, you're saying that, you know, luxury beliefs are held by highly educated, affluent people. Like, how is it that, you know, people who went to college and people who are at least on paper supposedly very smart, why are they like, why do they believe things that are clearly nonsense? And, you know, there are a lot of different reasons for this, but one that I highlight in that long essay is that, you know, intelligence can be used to accomplish multiple goals. You know, your smarts, right? Like, if you're a smart person, you can use your brainpower to seek the truth. That's one use that you could make of your you know, outsized brain. But another thing you can do with it is climb social hierarchies or to navigate complex, uh, uh, cultural minefields and find your way to obtaining more, you know, greater prestige and, um, strengthen your reputation and, and win the favor of your, uh, favored political in-group. And so I go through that, um, you know, that, that, that article I cite research indicating that, um, you know, for example, self-censorship is actually within the US, it's, it's the highest among highly educated people. Um, so for people who have a high school degree or less in the US, about 25% of people, uh, in that category say that they withhold their opinions for fear of being fired or, uh, damaging their employment prospects. Uh, and then for college graduates, it's 34%. Uh, and then by the time you get to people with postgraduate degrees, it's, um, it's 44%. And so, you know, basically, like, when it comes to certain contentious political issues, if you speak to someone, uh, with a postgraduate degree, yeah, you might as well flip a coin to determine whether they're telling you the truth. Um, they— and, and the reason why they're self-censoring is because they're, they're well aware that there are certain things that are taboo. And as a result of this, as a result of this sort of self-censorship, you know, they're— they very quickly pick up on what's okay and what's not okay to say, and they withhold their views. Um, people who are the most ideologically driven on both sides of the political spectrum do tend to be more educated and, uh, and have higher earnings than the average. Most Americans kind of have relatively moderate views. I cite the work of David Shore, the Democrat political analyst, in that paper, and he reports that, you know, basically You know, most Americans are fairly moderate and, you know, aren't, aren't particularly strongly political in their outlook. But then the higher up you go in terms of education and earnings, people become very politically aware and very conscious. And, you know, they, they learn to use their sort of cognitive and material resources to implement their preferences. And, you know, they are often sort of They have this sort of blind spot in terms of, you know, what's actually true in the world versus what their preferences are. And, you know, you can see this historically. There was a survey in the Soviet Union which found that the highest earning and most educated citizens in the Soviet Union were the most supportive of communist ideology. So like white-collar workers were 2 to 3 times more supportive of communist ideology than semi-skilled laborers and farm workers. I also cite some anecdotes from William Shirer in this book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And this— he was an American journalist who wrote this book. He was walking through Nazi Germany, like speaking with ordinary German citizens. And a lot of them were seemingly, you know, when they would talk about anything other than politics, They were knowledgeable and smart and sophisticated and so on. But then as soon as he started talking about sort of current events and political issues and so on, they just started parroting the party line of Hitler and Goebbels and the Nazi Party. And he has this line in the book about sometimes he was tempted to say so, and whenever he did, people looked at him as if he had blasphemed the Almighty, like, how could you say that? And these are educated people. I noticed this in the US too, that politics was just not like a big part of my life when I was growing up. Most sort of working-class people, politics, it's sort of, it's just not, it doesn't loom as large. But by the time I arrived at Yale, and this was one of the sort of culture shocks that I had, was that it seemed like everyone is kind of reading the news. They knew what the latest fashionable op-eds were, what the current trends were, the political opinions, the what was this big splashy piece in The Atlantic that people are talking about? And I'm like, I've never even read The Atlantic. And it was just a very important part of American upper middle class life to know what are the current events, what are the political— even if you don't agree with the political issues, to be able to recapitulate the views of various prominent cultural critics and commentators. And this was very new to me. And so long story short, that's basically the point that smart people will Often expend their abilities, their intelligence to sort of use it as a form of motivated reasoning. They have these blind spots and oftentimes they're not even aware of it. That's one piece of it. But then the other piece is that they're also very good at knowing, quickly picking up on what the taboos are. So even if they disagree with them, they'll withhold their opinions.

Yeah. One of the contributions I wanted to talk about that you've made is in dating, particularly analyzing dating app data. And one of the things that seems obvious in retrospect is that there's sort of this effect where the top percentage of men are getting a much wider set of women. And I think it's something like the top 20% of men are competing for the top 80% of women or something. Why don't you briefly unpack what was most surprising about going deep on on dating app data or something that maybe the public may not fully appreciate about what's happening in the dating markets?

Yeah, I guess this was something else that I became a little bit known for, was writing about what's happening on the dating apps and on dating in general. Because I actually dug into some of the research on this and not just— there was this popular Medium article that came out and some people have challenged some of his conclusions. But it did find, you know, basically the punchline for that one was like the top— what is it like the top 20% of men are receiving sort of 80% of the attention of the women. And, you know, then the bottom 20% of men are trying to compete for the, you know, the— what is it like the top or bottom 80% of women, something along those lines. There's this massive sort of asymmetry there. And, you know, it was, it was interesting. But then I actually looked at, you know, sort of peer-reviewed psychology research and people who were actually studying this in a more scientifically rigorous way. And there was one paper that essentially came to roughly the similar conclusion, which was that basically the average man on Tinder— so this was a Tinder study— that the average man will swipe right, they'll like the profile of roughly 60% of the female profiles they see. So more than half.

Wow.

of women will be swiped by the average man. So the vast majority. Whereas the reverse, so when women see male profiles, they'll only like roughly 4% of the male profiles they see. And a lot of those 4% of men are almost certainly the same. It's the same 4%. And so you do have this effect where 4% of men are getting the vast majority of the attention. There was a similar study on Hinge, which found that something like 10% of the men on Hinge were getting 60% of the matches. And you know, just anecdotally, I could see this when I was in college. You know, I saw guys who would collect matches well into the thousands. I knew one friend of mine got like something like 20,000 matches in total. I mean, it was you know, he got this like special perks from these apps. They were like, "Oh, you're like a high-value user." Here's like, you know, we're gonna lift your radius restrictions. And XYZ and just give them all of these free perks. And then, you know, then I knew other guys who would get like maybe a match a week. It would slowly trickle in and they'd have difficulty even finding a single date on the apps. And I think that's kind of the typical male experience on the apps is like you just don't get that much attention. If you're a very desirable male, you get a lot of attention. And I think this is probably having, you know, some non-trivial effect on on why, you know, growing numbers of young people are single or have no interest in a relationship. Or, uh, yeah, it's something like, um, yeah, like, like record high numbers of young men are single. And, you know, it's probably contributing to some degree to like the cynicism that young people have about relationships now. Because, you know, it's one thing where, you know, back in the day when you had to meet someone in person and you had to sort of fumble your way through a social interaction. And, you know, you had your kind of reputation on the line, and often social circles would overlap. So if you were cold or mistreated someone, um, you know, word would get out, and so people would behave themselves. Whereas now, if you match with someone and you know you'll never see them again, like, you know, you have these kinds of, um, you know, like dark triad men, people who, you know, men who are very high on these, these dark triad traits, who will, uh, you know, say very Cruel things to women, or they'll manage to get them out on a date and then you know tell you know deceive them in some way. And so what I think might be happening, and then this is sort of like the stylized, narrativized version of what what might be happening would be you know basically men who are high on the dark triad traits narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism get on the apps. They accrue a lot of matches. They're usually very good at first impressions. I mean, this is sort of consistent finding in psychology research. Is that men who are high on the dark triad tend to make very good first impressions, but then gradually they, they tend to burn, uh, bridges very quickly, and people sort of learn who they really are. They, they sort of identify that, oh, this very sort of glib and charming person is actually, uh, untrustworthy. So they have to move on very quickly. But at least at first sight, they're very attractive to women and maybe tell them lies or tell them they want a relationship. They sleep with some women and then just ghost them or never talk to them again. And this is costless because, you know, they don't have the same friends in common, so it wouldn't, it wouldn't matter. Uh, then these women, uh, have, you know, maybe a few of these negative experiences with these men who lie to them, and then they themselves become very cold and will, you know, kind of be cruel to the men that they match with or decide that men aren't worth it anymore and, and so on. And this is, you know, it's kind of a male-centric point of view. I'm sure there, there are probably women who are very high on the dark triad who You know, also kind of whatever mistreat men as well. But you know, I I've heard you know several several different from several different sources that you know men who are using these apps can accrue lots of numbers very quickly, and you know one can only imagine like you know the women who interact with them and what they must feel like after, especially like you know when when they think that they're going to this is on the path to a relationship and then it just goes cold. So I think like this is probably having some outsized effect. And I have seen some interesting data recently that more and more young people are opting out of the apps. I don't know if this is going to continue or if this is, you know, I'd want to see some more data on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case, that there was this kind of— I mean, this often happens with sort of psychopathic, like dark triad personality types. Like once they infiltrate into something, you know, it's like, it's like, it's like fun for a little while, then they infiltrate and kind of ruin it, and then, and then it kind of dies, and, and then people move on. And I wonder if that's— if that may have been what happened with, with the dating apps, or if, um, you know, people are developing more sophisticated ways to, to weed out these types of people.

That's great articulation and overview. It seems like there's a real matching problem, um, where, uh, there's just a large set of unhappy people who are not getting together. And it feels like I've only identified a few different solutions to this matching problem, all of which seem either unlikely or undesirable. One is that women change their dating preferences, i.e., date down, so to speak. You know, 60% of women are college students or something to that effect. And, you know, women are less likely to date people in a less, you know, who didn't go to college if they went to college or in a worse socioeconomic position. So either women do change their preferences and decide to date down, or the median man starts to do better than the median woman again, at least in terms of college or otherwise, which also seems either unlikely or undesirable, at least to a certain population or a certain sort of— to most people, perhaps. And then the other is if polyamory or polygamy is normalized, i.e., we just embrace the status quo. And find a way for that to be sustainable. But that seems unlikely. I don't think we're going to have a ton of Elons out there just having kids with multiple people. And then the last situation is just that combination of artificial wombs and AI girlfriends or AI boyfriends makes the current situation of people not matching somewhat tenable. And maybe people have kids in other ways, though that also seems unlikely and undesirable. Any reaction to these or any scenario which I missed?

No, I don't. Yeah, it's really, yeah, I try not to make predictions. I mean, it's, you know, like, I've read enough of Phil Tetlock's work, the psychologist, you know, he basically found that, like, you know, people, experts tend to be very bad at predicting the future. And then sort of like the more highly regarded that the expert is, the worse the predictions tend to be, funny enough. So, But anyway, like, just generally, people are bad at forecasting the future. I mean, my— just at like a gut level, I would say like, I think the, um, the AI like girlfriend or boyfriend thing, I mean, this is like my immediate reaction to it is like, this is going to be very bad for relationship formation that, you know, these, you know, these AI, it can, it can sort of be optimized, it can be tailored for the individual. So if they like You know, it can, it can sort of respond based on feedback from the user. And, you know, if they like this kind of personality type or this appearance or this person, um, that it'll be, I think, just incredibly seductive, uh, especially for like very lonely people or even people who— I mean, I think like it's, it's a weird thing, Brad, because I think people who are like extremely introverted, extremely shy, maybe people who, you know, ordinarily wouldn't have like a ton of romantic options, you know, if you have like a severe disability or disfigurement or what have you, just like really, really hard life. Like, I think something like AI, like, that would actually be great, um, to like provide some kind of companionship for very lonely people who have some kind of extreme malady. But then there are people who, like, like a young, a young guy or young, you know, young woman who's just kind of like borderline introvert, a little bit shy, a little bit self-conscious, you know, they have 2 options before them. You know, just kind of simplifying, but one is to actually just sort of go out into the world and try to get a girlfriend or a boyfriend. And then the other would be to just sort of put on your VR headset or whatever and just like interact with your AI girlfriend who already loves you, who you don't have to, you know, like it's, there's no, it's just effortless. I mean, I, it just seems like very obvious to me that a lot of people who would be on that sort of boundary between, you know, In another time, in another context, they would stretch themselves and, and put themselves out there and, and, and manage to get a real relationship. But instead, they take the easy path, uh, and instead, uh, go the, go the AI route. And so I think, like, we will see large numbers of young people who, you know, maybe if they had been the same age 15 years ago, they would have gone one way, and now they're going to go in this, this, this sort of more like whatever, like withdraw more further into the self rather than sort of, you know, going outward into the world. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, man. It's, it's very difficult to see. You know, there's Geoffrey Miller, the evolutionary psychologist. He wrote this very interesting piece a few years ago for, for Edge. And he basically said, like, technology explains the Fermi paradox. I don't know if you're familiar with this piece, Erik, but it's really, you know, basically he says—

I have.

Yeah. Well, yeah. So, yeah, for the listeners too, I mean, like, basically his point, he's an evolutionary psychologist, really smart guy. Basically he says that, so the Fermi paradox is like, you know, basically, you know, why is it that we haven't seen aliens yet? Like, the universe should be teeming with life considering like the number of planets and the number of stars and galaxies and so on and so forth. There should be, you know, a lot more, you know, we should just, by now we should have seen the aliens, you know, and I'm, I'm like very much butchering and paraphrasing, but that's basically the idea. Why haven't we seen them? Miller suggests that this is because like any, any civilization that advances far enough along will start looking outward and start looking inward, simply because like our evolutionary impulses will be hijacked. So, you know, instead of like trying to procreate and, and, and build a rocket ship to Mars, instead we just like watch porn and play video games that give us the feeling that we're having sex and going to Mars. Because to our brains, these are indistinguishable, and one of those things is much easier than the other. Oh, great. Like you mentioned Elon earlier, like Elon is like living in the real world. He is having like real babies, and he's really sending rockets to Mars and so on. But, you know, like, like, you know, if there's only one Elon, right? Like there aren't many other people who are doing that. Many more people would rather withdraw into themselves than go out into the world. And so, yeah, I think it's— we're going to We're going to, like, I think, like, bifurcate in some ways where people are going to start, like, sort of becoming more intentional in how they live their lives and whether or not they want to actually have relationships, get married, have children. It's not going to be a cultural default. It's going to be an intentional decision. And others will, yeah, just sort of disappear into the, into the, like, the VR metaverse.

It's, yeah, there'll be bifurcation. It's fascinating. You wrote a post a while ago, um, called No One Expects Young Men to Do Anything and They Are Responding by Doing Nothing. And there's been this kind of rise in consciousness over the past few years, I'd call it, of sort of the plight of men. Uh, you know, Richard Reeves, uh, a kind of normie academic— I say that in a positive way, not a negative way— um, wrote, wrote a book about how men are struggling. And I just, I say the normie academic to say that this isn't just like a manosphere fringe topic. It's starting to get real. uh, sort of mainstream adoption or mainstream kind of recognizing, uh, recognition. Uh, even Bryan Caplan wrote a book about, you know, don't be a feminist, which, you know, might have gotten him canceled a few years ago. It feels like things are moving on the gender front. I mean, the more extreme version of, of, uh, of, of a conversation that's happening is, is this Aporia piece that came out recently about how, um, you know, the, the baby boom in the, in the '30s and '40s was really caused by a marriage boom. And the reason why, why that occurred is because we had a sudden increase in status among men. And thus the implication for if we want a baby boom today is that we need, need a marriage boom, which would require sort of the elevating of status of, of men again, almost like a DEI for men or some sort of, um, you know, movement to help the, the, the median man, which as you could see, or as you could imagine, would be an anathema to, uh, to many people today.

Mm-hmm.

And it's like you talk to some women about it and they're like, hey, this is like, we would rather have underpopulation than— not just women, a lot of people. This is just so tasteless that you'd rather have a population collapse than do DEI for men if that's what it actually took.

I mean, what's funny is like we already like maybe like explicit DEI, people would really find that distasteful, but we already have affirmative action for men in universities. Like that already exists. Like if you talk to administrators at universities, they do put their thumb on the scale for male applicants because there's such a scarcity of men already applying for college. I mean, essentially, if you have a male applicant and a female applicant to a university and they have exactly the same grades and test scores and everything, everything's the same. Like universities will always favor the man in these cases simply because, you know, universities essentially like the, you know, the internal data. that, that I'm familiar with is that essentially once a campus dips below 40% male, then women will stop applying. Uh, because, you know, college is many things. One thing that college does is provide, you know, supposedly, you know, if you, if you believe, you know, the, the, the conventional stories, it provides an education and, you know, you, you learn things and whatever, you, yeah, but you get your degree. But then the other service that at least like, you know, the sort of conventional colleges provides is, is like, it's a dating service, right? Like, girls also like to go to college to meet guys and to date and to have fun and so on. And you need guys there to, to do those things. And so if there aren't enough guys, women start to lose interest, uh, on campus. And so, like, you know, a lot of, a lot of universities are already implementing— yeah, kind of a DEI for men. I've never heard it put that way, but that's fun. That's funny. Um, but, but yeah, like, it's, um, I think it's hard to predict. So now with technology, like, anything is possible with what could happen next. I, you know, I just, I don't see us like turning back the clock and going to a place where we're back to, you know, back where men are conferred extra respect and are, you know, economically appealing in the way that they were in the past, now that women are, you know, economically independent and they don't require that anymore. You know, I— there's, there's really interesting work from Gregory Clark, the economic historian. He's written a couple of different books. One was called The Sun Also Rises, S-O-N. And basically he finds that, you know, assortative mating actually hasn't changed that much throughout the centuries. And he looked at a variety of different societies. I mean, he looked at England, he looked at Sweden, he looked at Japan. So kind of a relatively diverse array of countries for which you could collect data and basically found that, you know, despite education opportunities opening up for women, despite, you know, basically the rapid cultural shifts over the last few decades, over the last century, that, you know, when you look at the underlying social status of husbands and wives, they actually haven't changed. And the way that he measured it historically was to look at the the status of the father of the wife, right? And so, like, is the father of the, the bride, um, what is his social status? And almost always his status was roughly equivalent to the husband, uh, in question. And so, you know, like, there's this story, like, that we tell about, like, the mid-20th century where, like, executives would marry their secretaries, and that doesn't happen anymore. And there was some of that going on. But then if you looked at the father of the secretary, you know, you know, the stylized fact would be, you know, the father of the secretary was probably an executive or someone who was of roughly equal station to the man who's asking his daughter to get married. And so even though, you know, on paper they're different, you know, there's sort of underlying, you know, cognitive ability and personality and preferences and all of those things are aligned. But then again, like with technology, with, you know, with more and more men just completely dropping out, like, I mean, it's a real problem, man. Like, I have friends who, you know, that I grew up with who are just like completely checked out. Like I've met, I've met like 20-year-old Zoomers, like guys who have, you know, they've hooked up with girls. Maybe they've had, they've slept with some women, but never had a girlfriend. Like that's like a very common story now that even when I was 20, it wasn't that, you know, I'm a millennial, but like, yeah, it was still like, you know, getting into a relationship was still ultimately the goal. But now with Zoomers, it's just like, you know, if you hook up, but if you don't, it's fine. And, you know, to just normal to like not ever actually have a real relationship, to just be stuck in a string of, you know, this term situationship. Like that's just kind of the norm now where like no one even seems to care that much about boyfriend or girlfriend or, yeah, it's, it's very different now.

Yeah. And so do you expect in the future the current trends only to continue if you don't expect sort of the economic situation to, to change or preferences to change? that there's just this increasing, like, bifurcation, basically, or increasing, you know, non-connect— like, men and women just don't match?

Yeah, I don't— yeah, yeah, I don't know. Like I said, it's hard to predict. I mean, I think, like, seems like the most plausible outcome would be, yeah, that, yeah, like this bifurcation idea of, like, some people will become, like, you know, some version of Amish where they will, like, intentionally avoid the technology I mean, in the same way, like, have you ever met someone like this, Erik, where they're just like, I've never done cocaine because I know I would like it too much, so I just like abstain from drugs because I, I know that I'll just get addicted? You know, like, there are those. And I wonder if like the same thing will happen with like, you know, hyper-realistic VR porn or AI girlfriends or something where like there will be, you know, people who will just say like, I know that I would get sucked into it, so I'm just not gonna do it. And I wonder if, like, yeah, people are just gonna have to, like, be more, you know, sort of aware and intentional about it. And I don't know, what do you think? Like, what do you think that is going to happen with, like, relationships and romance, the romance of the future?

I suspect that current trends will continue unless, you know, until morale improves. I think unless there's some significant change. I, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort of, uh, subtle or implicit, um, sort of DEI for men, as you mentioned. Like maybe there's, uh, affirmative action for men that tries to get closer to 50/50 in colleges, because I think, I, I think women also recognize, um, the challenges, um, with, you know, not enough good men. And so maybe there are like cultural initiatives that get at this from a more oblique or indirect way. Um, I think there— I think there's going to be more men's movements, um, some of which are going to be positive and some of which are going to be very extreme. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Andrew Tate looks kind of tame, you know, uh, like relative to like what's— what's coming. Um, I feel like there's going to be an increase— increasing bifurcation of like, uh, I think— I think the manosphere and the feminists are only going to get more extreme. And I think the feminists are going to be kind of like alpha as well. Like, and so I suspect just, just more and more polarization, basically. But yeah, it'll get interesting.

Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't considered that, like Andrew Tate being tame. I mean, that's— yeah, I guess you could say that. Like, I remember when, when he started getting popular, I don't know when it was, 2021 or '22. I saw like mainstream, you know, legacy media columnists saying basically like they almost like lament, like they, they kind of missed when Jordan Peterson was popular, right? They were like, you know, like Jordan was, you know, whatever, he was cantankerous old man or something, but, you know, like, you know, compared to Tate, you know, he was, he was more sensible and more grounded and whatever. Now you have this just like, you know, this TikTok influencer who's just, you know, way more in your face and, and provocative. And so yeah, the idea that yeah, maybe in like a few years you'll have like Andrew Tate 2.0 or 3.0, who's just like, you know, even more out there. I mean, that, yeah, that, that actually does sound like very, very possible.

I feel like the, these, this idea that someone controversial is going to seem tame in a few years is, is, is not just limited to this idea. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if we start to have much more honest conversations about IQ as well, as the science gets better, as the technology gets better. You know, someone, Balaji, had the line that as soon as IQ is editable to some degree, then, you know, it's going to be— then I think the progressives will embrace it as, you know, IQ privilege. You know, they may have been saying for a while it doesn't exist, but once it's editable, you know, people who have lower ones are going, you know, you should demand the ability to change it or or get some reparations or something based off of it. It's interesting how these things can change so quickly once there's an incentive to hide them versus make them public because of what people gain as a result. But my overarching point is that as the science gets better, as the tech gets better, it seems like true ideas want to become public. And so maybe the Charles Murrays of the world or other people will become, you know, more, more tamer, uh, as a, you know, versus vilified.

That's interesting. Yeah, I, I mean, I do remember, um, yeah, in a way this kind of vindicates, uh, this, this, uh, discussion Steven Pinker had several years ago. He was at some panel or something and he was basically defending this idea that we should have open dialogue about various ideas. Because if, you know, public respectable intellectuals or, you know, just basically like more responsible people aren't speaking about it, it will sort of be discussed anyway in sort of more darker corners of the internet, or people who, you know, their, their aim isn't just to communicate the information in a sort of matter-of-fact way, but in order to whatever, like be, you know, with this sort of gleeful, uh, gleeful tone or sort of enjoy sort of mocking people or, or insulting people. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, you had, you had someone like Jordan Peterson who was, you know, communicating in a sort of a psychological way, grounded in research, grounded in, you know, uh, his experience and so on. And then you have someone like Tate who's just like, you know, he doesn't really talk about empirical research or differences between the sexes or whatever. He's just like kind of speaking from his firsthand point of view as like a pimp and someone who just wants to collect a large following and Someone like Charles Murray, right, who's like a respected scholar at a think tank, who's written a lot of books. And, you know, even behind closed doors, if you speak to more left-of-center professors and intellectuals and so on, like, they will acknowledge that they respect Charles Murray. They would, you know, many of them wouldn't say it publicly, but privately they acknowledge that he's done great work. But, but he got like unpersoned, right? And so like now it's, you know, anon Twitter accounts and you know, people with sort of more, you know, perhaps, yeah, more malicious motives or something who are deciding like to post FBI crime stats and criminal, like, you know, IQ and differences and all this stuff. And I mean, we kind of did it to ourselves that we wouldn't allow the conversation to be had in a public way, in a more responsible way. And now irresponsible people are, are having it. And it's, you know, it's, it's kind of like it's the fault of the chattering class, honestly. Like, they kind of deserve what happened because they wanted to police the boundary of polite discussion. And, and, you know, it's like, what did you think was going to happen? Like, of course, these conversations are going to be held anyway.

So maybe this is a segue to another topic that you've, you know, written about from a different perspective, but universities, right? We're now having a great sort of reckoning to some degree. It feels like Bill Ackman discovered DEI, you know, a couple of months ago and maybe is, you know, threatened to end it like within a month or something. I mean, it's kind of crazy, his his progression and how much traction he's made, it feels like this is the greatest threat to university hegemony, like, I don't know, since I've been alive or paying attention to it in terms of the ability for the public on Twitter to litigate the firing of the president of Harvard or the president from a non-woke perspective, from a non-DEI perspective. And it's just creating a broader conversation around what's actually happening at these universities. You know, the— it feels like Jews have woken up, at the very least. Of it— what's fascinating about Jews is that they're a large percentage of donors but a very small percentage of people. Um, and so, uh, you know, the— we see these pro-Palestinian sentiments on universities, and Jews are saying, whoa, what's happening here? And because they're a large percentage of the donor base, they can actually threaten the university in a way that, uh, you know, lots of angry anti-woke people could never threaten the, the, uh, sort of economic security of, uh, of the university. So how do you make sense of, of what's happening here? Or, or more broadly, like, what are— what's underdiscussed as, as kind of the challenges of these universities in terms of pursuing their, their, their, their supposed mission of pursuit of, pursuit of truth? I know you're involved with UATX. And, uh, what would you love to see If you look back in the next few years and we say, hey, wow, we have a much better climate on, on, in higher education, how could that happen? And one thing I'll just say really quickly is while I love efforts like UATX and Thiel Fellowship and others to come, we want more of it. I also think the, the, you know, taking over existing institutions is underrated by people who want to make a change because I'm in the startup and VC ecosystem. Startups and VCs tend to think in new institutions. But I think what Elon showed and what Bill Ackman showed is showing is like the power of almost like the private equity mindset of like, hey, it's actually pretty hard to start something new, like a new Harvard. Like, let's, let's do that. But also maybe these, these institutions are not as hard to influence as people think. Like with coordinated, you know, Chris Rufo, of course, is showing the way in some ways with coordinated campaigns. you know, maybe you can actually influence existing institutions to move in the, in the ways that you want. And maybe, maybe we just gave up on that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't— yeah, I don't like when people, you know, mostly on the, yeah, the political right or at least like the, you know, the non-woke center when they debate like, oh, we need new, new institutions, parallel institutions versus reform. Like, I just think like the whole— like you can do both. Like you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can sort of concentrate your efforts depending on your preferences. There are enough people, enough resources to To do both, depending on you know where where your inclinations are and what your predilections are. So, you know, I'm involved with UATX, and you know, I would you know I I want the project to succeed. But at the same time, like I definitely support efforts for reform. I don't think it's okay. I'm not like one of these black pill doomers of like oh Harvard's over the New York Times. It's all like all these places. They're all captured. Who you know like of course like you know time changes opportunities arise. You know, like, I think 3 or 4 years ago, it would have been inconceivable for Harvard to oust, you know, a Black female president, right? Like, at the height of the George Floyd era, it's just impossible. But political forces aligned and things happened, and Rufo and his team, and, you know, it's just any, you know, depending on how determined you are, if you're, you know, whatever, like the whole, like that cliché about preparation meets opportunity, right? Like, that's— there's some truth to that. And so what would I like to see happen? I mean, like, even something as basic as upholding the rules that are already on the books, right? Like, there was that story a couple of months ago about Brown and like, like a bunch of students— I don't know, didn't they like barricade themselves in like the president's office or one of these buildings or something? And the administration actually called the police and had them arrested. And I read that, I was just like, I was completely flummoxed by this because like, you know, because that's what I wanted for the longest time was like, why aren't they arresting these kids? Or why aren't they like actually Penalizing them in some material way, and then I read, and then I just thought like it's impossible. Like these people just don't have it in them. You know, it's just I guess it's just like for whatever reason, you know, if you come from that back, you know, I almost thought it yeah like this thinking in that that these terms of like well it's just it's almost like a form of privilege that if you're the son or the daughter of an aristocrat, like the administration is just not going to arrest you or call for you to be arrested. But no, they actually did. Like they managed to do this. And it was, it was nice to see. And it would be nice if more universities did that, that actually there are rules in the books for student misconduct and threatening violence and interfering with people's lives. And, you know, you don't have to come up with anything new, but just like actually uphold what's on the books already. Like the, the guidelines and regulations don't uphold themselves. It's not like the text jumps out of the books and, you know, force, you know, puts the kids in handcuffs or something. Like, no, like someone an adult needs to actually say, like, you agreed to this when you matriculated to this university and you're violating this rule, and this is like the inevitable consequence. And so, and whatever, like, these— they're going to be fine anyway, right? Like, if you go to Brown, you're never like— your life isn't over just because you got arrested once. You're going to be fine anyway. But at least to like have some, some penalty for misconduct would be nice. And I think that alone could have some effect on the culture on campus, the climate. Um, to just know that you can't actually, you know, you can't violate the rules like that. Um, you know, I think they could do a better job of sort of fostering intellectual, um, diversity. I know that like, like at Cambridge, there was recently some kind of resolution passed. I mean, it's really interesting, right? Because like ostensibly the university already, um, had rules on the books about academic freedom and freedom of expression. Like, those already existed, but they passed this like new resolution to like reaffirm it, which I found really interesting that like something like that can actually be enough to like quell, uh, activists and people who would want to get people fired, is to just for like the people who are in charge to just publicly and collectively stand united and say, by the way, we just want to affirm academic expression and freedom and we're not going to fire people or you know, ostracize people or vilify them simply because they exercised the right that exists on the book for them as a member of this university. You know, for more elite universities to do something like that— if Harvard did that, if Yale did that, if Stanford and so on, if all of these universities collectively did something like this— maybe it needs to be done on an annual basis to just like remind the students and remind the faculty and, and the activists that like you can't, you know, you can't just mob people and, and sign petitions and get people fired. Um, and to just sort of stand united in that way and to grow a backbone. I mean, a lot of these, you know, a lot of it is just due to cowardice. Like, I know professors who have privately told me, you know, they've seen their colleagues get mobbed or attacked or ostracized or the petition circulated, and they've— they want to say something publicly. Like, they would like to say, like, you know, this is my colleague, this is my friend, this is someone that I respect. But they, they're also just like sort of cowardly nerds who want to keep their head down and do the research, and they don't want to like have their lives turned upside down and get distracted with— now you have to deal with the activists who are going to turn their pitchforks on you and say, how could you defend a sexist or a racist or whatever? Like, now you get to be the one who is under the spotlight for a while. And so most of them just want to keep their heads down, do their research in their labs or their departments or whatever. And you know, if more people could collectively, like, stand up and, and, and say something about this, of, you know, and more have been doing it to their credit. I mean, especially in the wake of, you know, the, the October 7th and everything that happened after that, you are seeing more professors speak out finally. I mean, it took ages, man. Like, I, you know, in my book, I describe my observations of kind of like the birth of what people now call wokeness in 2015. And it took, it took 9 years, uh, and like however many hundreds of professors who've been fired and students who have been ostracized or, or had their admissions letters revoked. And, you know, it took 9 years of, of, uh, you know, just a completely, you know, disorderly lunacy, uh, before, you know, these institutions seem to, you know, finally be drifting back to the right track. Took a long time, but, you know, it's nice to see it.

It's fascinating because people back then, you know, the Jonathan Haidts of the world, who I think have done great work, but I also think have like underrated the dangers of what's happening, they would say things like, hey, it'll sort of succumb to its own contradictions, or it'll burn itself out. And I thought that was the cope or wishful thinking. Although I wonder if something like that has happened. I mean, certainly having Trump out of office, Has contributed significantly to not having kind of a threat, a boogeyman threat. But then also, I think perhaps, you know, sort of extremists playing their hand, like overplaying their hand a little bit too significantly. Maybe COVID accelerated sort of the, you know, discovery of the incompetence. Um, but then also, you know, maybe it's the, the right-wing, uh, or sorry, anti-woke activists who either, you know, showed what was happening or presented, uh, paths to, uh, to actually fight back. So maybe it's a, maybe it's a combination, but interesting to, uh, to sort of explain or try to explain how it, how that's happened.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, that's— there, there is something. Yeah, I remember thinking that that was a coup too. I, you know, I like, I like Jonathan Haidt a lot. I like his work. Um, I mean, not, not just his sort of public intellectual work, but also his like moral psychology work, which was actually how I initially, uh, became a fan of his. But yeah, I wondered too whether, yeah, whether this would ever burn itself out. Like, it just seemed like it had, especially, you know, as of like, you know, 2 or 3 years ago, it just seemed like this is, you know, just every other day it seemed like someone— because I mean, one thing that I pointed out is that like, we, we know of the public cases of cancellations of professors being fired or resigned, or like lower-level researchers, postdocs and PhD students too. were also, you know, sort of being, being jettisoned. But for every public cancellation you saw, there were probably at least 5 others that you didn't see, because I knew several people who were fired or forced to resign. And there were— there was no media attention at all because they didn't want it. Right. Like, again, like most researchers just want to keep their head down. They don't like, you know, unwanted attention. They don't like being in the spotlight for something that doesn't have anything to do with the research. And so if like, you know, a group of PhD students, you know, unites, signs a petition and forces the department to, to, you know, quietly remove this professor, they just, they don't want to go to the media with it. They just want to like keep their head down, hope it blows over and maybe get a nice little research job somewhere else. And you just don't hear about those cases. And so, you know, it was just so funny to me here. Like it was, it was more, it was a more common line a few years ago about like, oh, cancel culture doesn't exist. It's like it exists and it's actually bigger than you think. But people just have this— they only see what they see, and there's all of this other behind-the-scenes occurrences that we're unfamiliar with. But yeah, I mean, it seems like we're in a hopeful moment, and I think there's reason for cautious optimism.

Yeah. I want to gear towards closing by ending with a couple of topics that you dive into deep in the book. So you talk a lot about, obviously, your experience in foster care and That's not something that's discussed pretty publicly or that the public has a wide insight into. If you could wave a wand and change anything about how the foster care system works today, what do you think would be the biggest intervention or change that would make a positive difference?

I mean, one point that I make in the book, because I lived in 7 different homes in the span of about 4 or 5 years, and people ask me why I was you know, relocated so many times, why I had so many placements is the, you know, the, the term. And I mean, the reason they do that is essentially because often what happens is that a foster parent, a biological relative, uh, will often re-enter the picture, whether it's the mother or, you know, less often, but sometimes the father or an aunt or someone in the family can care for the child. They don't want the child to develop an attachment or a loyalty to any particular foster family that they stay with. Because this can, you know, this can basically create difficulty. It can create sort of custody issues. Often foster parents, you know, when they have a kid for a very long time, they often feel a sense of attachment to the kid, and they're willing to battle the biological relative in order to keep the kid. And so there's just this sort of conflict there. So they just move the kid all the time so that there's, you know, that, that's never really an issue. But of course, this has severe— especially for a kid who has no hope of being reunited with the biological relative, it just has severe emotional impact on their development, which that's what happened to me. Um, because, you know, I never knew my father. You know, my mother was addicted to drugs and she was deported. And so I had all these, you know, basically, oh, there was no hope of me being reunited. And I guess if I could wave the wand, it would be something like, you know, to just— how would it— like, for the system to somehow be more tailored to every specific child's, um, case. I mean, because basically what happened with me was like, I don't know this for certain, but I'm, I'm pretty sure this is what occurred is just like the foster system is just this vast bureaucracy. They didn't really pay that close attention to what my circumstance was. It was just the kind of standard policy of, oh, kids shouldn't stay for longer than 6 months. So, oh, it's almost 6 months, move him somewhere else without actually looking at, well, what, you know, what, what is his circumstance? Where are his parents? What's going on? Does he have any hope of being reunited? Should he, should we just go ahead and like find a way to accelerate the adoption process? I mean, because I should have probably been adopted much earlier than I was. And so the magic wand would be, you know, basically somehow make the information for each kid much more readily available and easily accessible, and for the foster bureaucracy to actually sort of tailor their approach to each kid rather than just sort of a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all policy.

That makes a lot of sense. I just want to transition to your time in the military. The military is not something that's greatly understood as well in terms of what it's like to be part of it. In recent years, there's been some concern over sort of the wokefication of the military because you see these ads that sort of have these certain dynamics to them, these woke dynamics to them. What do you think is misunderstood about the role of the military in sort of norms or value or status or culture formation? In the country in terms of how it serves today?

Yeah, I mean, what's misunderstood? Well, I think like we have like maybe, maybe kind of 2 popular or like widely held views about the military in the US. So one is like that kind of post-World War II era where you just had like, you know, all these guys come back and they use the GI Bill, they go to college, and it was just this sort of engine of upward mobility for a lot of, a lot of, you young men in the US in the '40s and '50s. And I mean, it did serve that role. I mean, it also, I think, helped to sort of promote, like, kind of assimilation, because a lot of the people who served in both of the wars were actually the, like, first-generation or second-generation, like, sons of European immigrants. And so you had, like, Irish and Italian and Jewish people, like, people from, you know, not too far disconnected from the immigrant background who were suddenly all serving. And then they all go to college and sort of build that middle-class life and then, you know, just sort of integrate into the American lifestyle. And then so that's like one kind of narrative. The other one, it would be sort of the 1960s version, which is like, you know, a lot of sort of college students and middle and upper middle-class people, you know, deferring the draft or burning their draft cards. And so the people who served in Vietnam were primarily sort of lower income, less educated people. So then the popular view of the military became like this kind of refuge for people who are uneducated or don't have a lot of hope for the future. And I think like those two somehow became like the popular views. But I mean, the military is a lot different now. It's, it's very kind of professionalized. It's, you know, most people don't serve. Most people don't even know anyone really who, who is active duty or recent active duty in the military. You know, most people, it's like, you know, they had an uncle or grandfather or someone, but like no one knows a contemporary young person person who serves. Um, it's becoming sort of increasingly rare. I mean, I guess one would be like, in terms of class background, most recruits in the military do come from sort of middle-class backgrounds. There are a couple of reasons for that. I mean, one is that, uh, you have to pass, um, a standardized test to get into the military, and historically they've sort of played with where that threshold should be cut off, but now it's You know, basically you can't, you can't really be, um, you know, illiterate or innumerate. You have to meet a certain level of competence to enlist. And, uh, and the second thing is like you do have to jump through a fair amount of hoops now to, to get through the process, the screening process. So you just naturally, that's going to screen out a lot of like very low income, um, you know, very uneducated people. Um, you usually have to have at a minimum a high school diploma. Um, And the other thing is, I think, and this is speaking from more my personal experience, is it really did provide a kind of rigid structure that I lacked when I was a kid. And I mean, one of the big takeaways that I had, and I write about this in the book too, which is that you have to have some kind of structure in your life if you want to accomplish any goals. And when I was a kid, I completely lacked that oversight at all. You know, I had a ton of freedom and very little oversight or supervision. There was a lot of neglect, and all it did was just like allow me to make a series of very bad decisions. But then by the time I got to the military and I realized like, oh, having structure, having rules, having expectations in place, despite the fact that I really didn't like it, you know, I remember like the first year or so, I actually really— I like, I, there was, you know, some periods like in basic training especially where like I hated my instructors and superiors and the fact that I had to listen to them. And I had like a little bit of a chip on my shoulder with authority and everything. But then it wasn't until later that I was grateful to them and I was happy that they imposed all of this structure and these expectations and rules on me because good things started to happen. You know, it took me a while to sort of make those connections of, oh, actually, if I you know, follow this itinerary, this routine, and, you know, sort of build scheduled patterns into my life that actually, you know, good things started to happen. And I actually felt better despite, you know, at first I didn't like it, but actually, you know, in the long run it was actually good for me. And so, you know, for someone like me who really lacked it in my early life, to get it later was, was really critical. I mean, it was funny, the other day I was speaking to someone on her podcast about You know, she was like, you know, when I when I speak to you now and then I read about who you were when you were 17, it's like I can't even make that connection because you're such a different person. And you know, I basically explained that I was in the Air Force for eight years, right? Like that's a long time to be like I was. It was two enlistments, two four-year contracts. It's a long time, and that those were like my formative years, right from 17 to 25. You know, when my you know my brain hadn't full the cement hadn't dried. Like I still you know like basically I was still. forming habits and becoming an adult and building good habits. And, you know, I learned that, you know, basically eventually I learned to sort of impose that self-discipline on myself rather than needing it from an external source. And anyway, ultimately, yeah, all of this is to say that all of the tools that it equipped me with did lead me to, you know, go on to college and do pretty well academically and, you know, learn how to, how to be an adult.

I appreciate the overview. Gearing towards our last question here, tell us more about what's in the future for you. Like, how do you think about your kind of your moonshot or what you're trying to do? Because there are a bunch of different directions that you could go in, you know, deep dive in. And what's most interesting to you? What's your moonshot?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's been like I've already exceeded my own expectations for myself. And so now I'm in this weird space of like, I did a PhD, which I never thought I would ever do. So I got more education than I expected. I never expected to write a book this young. I thought at some point in college, I did have this idea of maybe writing a memoir or some kind of autobiography, but that was going to be maybe when I'm an old man. But forces aligned and literary agents started to express interest at a much earlier stage of my life than I expected. And I just went for it. And yeah, newsletter's doing— I mean, at some point, I think you and I have talked offline about maybe I'll do a podcast. Yeah. Maybe I'll, you know, do some, you know, YouTube channel, you know, because eventually I would like to sort of be in a position where I could amplify people's good— like what you do, right? Like you speak to interesting people, you communicate and share interesting ideas. And I like that. I like, I like the podcasting medium. The other, you know, the other thing is if the book does well enough and it's, you know, it's a big if, is, you know, to explore getting it optioned for movie or miniseries or something along those lines because, You know, the sad fact is that most people actually don't read anymore. I mean, it's, you know, it's increasingly rare, but more people will watch movies. More people will sort of like— if I could communicate the message and the lessons and some of the stories from the book in a different format that would be more easily accessible, that would be great. But that, you know, a million things have to go right for that to happen. And so, you know, these are just a couple of things— podcasts and then possibly movie. And yeah, I'm going to keep writing regardless. You know, if the book does well enough and they let me write another book, or I'll just self-publish. Like, I'm going to keep writing either way. And, you know, one thing I'm certain that I won't do, you know, despite my earlier, you know, I mentioned my earlier guarded optimism about the universities, I don't want to be a professor. I'm not that optimistic yet. I just, I don't know if there's room for someone like me in the academy, at least as it is now. But, you know, I wouldn't rule it out.

And someone like you, meaning your interests or your personality? perspective on things, or—

I mean, even some, like, if you believe in, you know, like, you know, group differences, you believe that, like, men and women are different, or you, you know, take, you know, take IQ serious. I mean, you mentioned maybe, you know, maybe the left will, you know, start taking IQ more seriously later. But, you know, if you just, like, accept the conclusions of, you know, sort of basic social science research, um, that alone can be enough to, to get people to, to despise you. Um, so yeah, I mean, and then also to just speak very frankly about these things is, uh, you know, it's still, it's still difficult to do. Still got to walk on eggshells if you're, if you're in the academy.

Yeah, if you have common sense on certain topics, you're, you're a liability.

Exactly.

Well, Rob, let's, um, let's wrap on, um, that. The, the, the book is Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care. Family and Social Class. Highly recommend it, as well as Rob's excellent Substack. We'll put links in the description. Do pre-order it. Rob, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you, Eric. This has been great.

Upstream with Eric Thornberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, Please leave a review in the Apple Store. Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry-leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co.