HoS: Rob Henderson

Welcome to the house of Stroud.

Yeah, go for it. Stars hang with stars, winners hang with winners. I'm flustered. It's okay. It's Monday. I've got my excuse. In the Bay Area, we had an earthquake at about 3 a.m., I think about a 4.8, which I suppose is a liminal earthquake. Rob Henderson of the self-titled Substack. It's just enough to scare everybody, to shake everybody awake without damaging the area. As far as I can see, We'll try to come up with a metaphor for whatever that is later. But how are you doing, man?

I'm good. I'm good. I'm glad to hear you're okay. You survived this natural disaster brought on by the changing climate. And it's just a reminder that we all need to keep in mind the impact of anthropocentric contribution to the changing weather patterns. And I ran out of steam there, but now I'm glad.

Or I thought you were more on the right, Rob. You should be attributing this to the demon. The demonic forces that we've been channeling, the golden calves we've been worshiping.

Oh yes.

But you know what? But it's too beautiful an area for God to fully smite. So he just gave us a little bit of a, in baseball they call it a brushback pitch. Just threw it, threw it at our cheek, grazed the cheek. It's just like, this time I'm serious. Get right folks. Find God. Do something. Do something else other than what you're doing out here.

I was listening to Bill Maher interview, who was, I mean, it might've been with his, on Club Random with David Mamet. And he said, And he compared the weather in California to the oil of the Saudi countries. And he says it allows the political leaders to get away with corruption and mismanagement because it's so beautiful in California. It's this sunshine as a resource in the way that oil is a resource for those other countries. And, you know, no matter how bad these places are governed, people still will be willing to live there. It allows you to get away with more misconduct. And I found that was an interesting parallel there because, yeah, even, even in its current state, I still sometimes think about moving back to my home state of California.

Well, it's impressive that we lose population. You would have to work really hard to force people out of the most beautiful piece of land potentially in the world. But I find myself often having this secret thread in my head with the people who run this state that I never make good on. Because of the dynamic that Mar articulated, where I've got extended family in Reno, and I go, hey, I'm, I'm moving to Reno. I'm serious. I'm serious, guys. I'm— I can't take it.

I'm moving. Why Reno?

Is that's the place I could go where I get different tax laws that's not too far away, and it's the easiest way I could potentially change my life, and there's family there. So it's, it's, it's a It's a threat that I never make good on. I never actually move to Reno. It's like a couple that fights and go, I'm gonna leave, I can't, no, but you're gonna, you're coming back. And that's where I'm at, where I'll do a lot of window shopping when it comes to houses in different states, but I'm not actually gonna do real shopping. I'm not gonna do shopping shopping though. Who knows, Rob, maybe there will be a precipitating event. I was telling myself the rat infestation of my neighborhood was going to be that, that this was the time it was serious. But it's never serious. I'm just not high agency enough, Rob. I can't make the call.

Pack up and move to the— what is it? The biggest little city in the world or something.

Yeah. Reno.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember I visited there once when I was a little kid. It was like one of my cousins did like a shotgun wedding in Reno and I must have been, I don't know, 10 years old when we went over there. I was 10. I couldn't have any fun there. But later I come to realize Reno has a reputation for people who want to gamble and make their lives a little bit worse but can't afford to go to Las Vegas. Yes. But maybe I'll meet you there if Mom Donny becomes the mayor of New York.

Reno will make Reno the next Austin, Texas.

There we go.

That's what it'll be. Look, some would say Reno is beautiful. Some would say that. Feel like Trump. Some would say that. I wouldn't say that.

Some would say that. I mean, maybe that's right. Yeah.

I wouldn't say it's ugly. It's got that high desert, but there's this problem, which is that it's about a half hour away from Tahoe, one of the most beautiful pieces of land and it immediately transitions from lush, beautiful greenery to desolate coyoteville and boom, that's the problem. That's the issue right there.

Okay.

That's the Nevada right there out there. Anyway, I should probably intro people into whatever the hell we're talking about. This is not going to be a sportsy episode unless Rob wants to make it one, which I suspect he will not. Rob is great writer, great thinker with a focus especially on what's going on with young men, what's going on with maleness, what's happening out there. He wrote this brilliant memoir of his own journey, which we talked about, I think, last time he was on. And there are a range of topics that overlap that wouldn't seem like they should overlap that are currently in the— I don't know what you want to call it— news cycle, something like that. Uh, the killing of Charlie Kirk, the aftermath of that killing, I know that you actually spoke to him or had some sort of interaction with him pretty soon before that. And it was because he was curious about your topic, the young male topic, the wayward young male topic. He is then killed by a young man. And then at his funeral, at the big memorial service, this is still a focus, the wayward nature of young men. Paraphrasing his wife, I believe she was talking about the lostness of this young man who murdered him. Being the center of, uh, Charlie Kirk's life. And I guess the first thing I'll say about it, Rob, why does this have a political valence? I mean, that's kind of strange. I feel as though something like this topic a decade, two decades ago wouldn't— it wouldn't exist in the realm of politics. Why is this part of politics?

Yeah, it is interesting. I actually think we're slowly, uh, it is becoming a more agreed-upon bipartisan concern. But we did go through this interesting period of— I don't know what you want to trace it back to, maybe circa the early Great Awakening 2012, or trace it back to the beginnings of MeToo, up until, you know, maybe within the last year or two where, you know, there was a very long and interesting piece in The Washington Post by— I think her name is Christine Emba— who was expressing her concerns about young men from a more left-leaning perspective. And you see people like Richard Reeves, who works for Brookings, and he's kind of a, you know, center-left guy who's also sounding the alarm. People like Scott Galloway and others. So I think people are starting to realize this is a serious problem. Post-2024 election, when you saw a lot of young men swing over to Trump. But no, I think the reason why it became politicized is people considered, you know, the whole gender discussion to be zero-sum, that if we focus time and attention and resources on helping young men, then, uh, this inevitably will lead to, uh, stripping time, attention, and resources away from women's issues, women's concerns. If we start talking about how young men are falling behind, well, then that means we're going to, um, you know, help to lift them up, which means we're gonna have to press women downward in some sense. There's a lot of discussion about how, you know, whenever you bring up the fact that an increasing number of young men are not attending college, the graduation rates are, are declining, there's a lopsided gender ratio where 60% of people who get bachelor's degrees are women now. You bring this up and a lot of the time the response will be, well, but if you look at the Fortune 500 CEOs, senators, successful, uh, uh, professions, you'll see there are a lot more men than women. And so men are doing just fine. Um, but that's because those older men came up in a different generation when there was more overt sexism against women. Um, I think it's, you know, with a matter of time, a decade or two from now, you'll see, um, probably a lot fewer men in a lot of those positions. You're seeing seeing it already in academia, where as the senior male professors start to retire, they're being replaced by women. So, you know, uh, when men feel— young men in particular feel that they are, um, you know, have no path toward success, some, unfortunately not many, but, but enough of them, a non-trivial percentage of them, do take drastic action. And maybe that was what we saw with Tyler Robinson and, and maybe with, with Luigi Mangione. I found it interesting that both of those guys were young. They were kind of, you know, smart, intelligent white guys. Mangione went to Penn. Tyler Robinson, he got a 34 on his ACT. So neither one of them were dumb, but they were, I think, broadly on the left. I mean, Mangione, I think his politics were a little disorganized. By now, I think it's clear that Robinson was generally a left-leaning person. But, you know, I wondered if this is pure speculation that if these two guys spend a lot of time in left-leaning circles and if you're a young white guy, you know, being, being called privileged or feeling as if you've done something wrong based on these immutable characteristics, but you want acceptance from those people who are lodging these charges against you, one way to advance within that space is to kill an even higher status white male than yourself. And so you have Luigi Mangione killing the, the CEO, um, and you have Tyler Robinson killing Charlie Kirk, you know, these guys who are older, higher status, more well-respected. And then they, um, you know, they, they, uh, acquire esteem and respect and admiration from the people who before that act would not have, um, you know, would not have accepted them in that same way.

That might be the case, though it's hard to divine the exact motivations of people crazy enough to go and murder somebody else. Now, why some of these infamous killers tend to be smart, that's a hard question. I'll do— I'll, I'll fit the stereotype right now and use a Pat Sports analogy, which is that intelligence, this horsepower of the mind, is a little bit like athleticism. And if you're really athletic you can make great plays, but you can get out of position even farther than a slower, less athletic guy can. That if somebody fakes you out, you can jump 5 feet in the wrong direction, whereas somebody without that ability would be perhaps less out of position or might not even be faked because he's not even about thinking about using his athleticism. Which is to say, a lot of that horsepower can really go in the wrong direction. And manifest itself in the ways of a political assassination. You can be a Tyler Robinson, a Luigi Mangione, or a Ted Kaczynski, though some people on the internet think that— they call him what, Brother Ted? Had things to say. I would say that he didn't use his time and energy particularly well, is what I would say. I think they find his anti-tech manifesto interesting. Some people do. But I— here at the House of Strauss, we are not supportive of Ted Kaczynski, who incidentally This is getting us nowhere in our conversation, but my best friend growing up, his mom took some classes from Ted Kaczynski at Berkeley, math classes, and said that he was a very nice man. That's what she said. That was the report about the Unabomber. But anyway, anywho, I think what you're saying is true broadly, even if it's not true specifically, where if you're in these spaces, the status game is a little bit more difficult and leads to just an adoption of, uh, certain personality traits. Or it, it sounds strange that I'm connecting what you're saying to something I've seen in media that is not violent at all, but I've noticed that a lot of the people in Media Guild union leadership are white men. And my observation, which might be uncharitable, is that they're not afforded an identity in these publications. They can't have a favorite identity. And all of a sudden, the union becomes the identity. The union leadership becomes the identity. And they pour a lot of their energy into that. I don't know if you've observed that because you didn't come through the decaying ranks of traditional media like I did, but it's something I've definitely noticed, that there's almost this unhealthy redirection and overcompensation that takes place because of the status game within the lefty circle.

Yeah, yeah. And to be clear, like, I don't have especially strong confidence in that. That was a speculation. But, you know, I, I think it probably played some role. You know, there's not one reason for, for why someone would do something so horrific. But I do wonder if that was one important reason why they decided to do this. But you're right, I did meet— I met Charlie. It was— it's crazy. It was exactly 2 weeks before he was shot. Let's see, it was August 27th when I met him and he was shot on September 10th. But it was a, you know, it's a strange thing where, you know, if you know, if you meet someone and they're clearly, you know, elderly or sick or injured or, you know, there's some, you can, you can mentally prepare for their demise. But when I met Charlie, like, obviously he was, he was at the height of his powers. He's tall, energetic. You know, it's weird to even speak about him in the past tense. But he was just a young, energetic— he's younger than me, he's 31, and, you know, full of energy, curiosity. I'd listened to him on podcasts before I met with him to prepare. And yeah, I noticed, you know, right away as I was speaking with him, I'd reference studies and books and statistics and psychologists and so on. And I'd see him writing things down and following up and asking interesting questions. And yeah, we spoke about, you know, young men. We spoke about personality psychology. We spoke about the decline in marriage rate. Relationship formation, all the kind of stuff that I've been interested in and been writing about. And yeah, he was very gracious, thoughtful host. One thing I liked about him was that he, you know, he was known mostly for being a political figure, a power broker, you know, very obviously a man of the right. But he would also occasionally have conversations with people about non-political topics like health or fitness, nutrition. With me, there was a little bit of political stuff, but mostly culture, not completely tied into politics. And he was able to switch the political part of his brain off and just focus on the matter at hand without interpreting it or filtering it through some kind of a conservative right-coded lens. He would take ideas on their merits. Um, and yeah, just a strange thing, you know. I flew into Phoenix, met with him at his studio, and then I left and thought, okay, I thought that was going to be the beginning of our friendship and had obviously no idea that that was going to be the last time I'd ever see him. So very strange time. And the fact that I only met him once, you know, people seem to, oh, you know, it would hit me harder, but it was really just a, you know, a 2-hour discussion we had. And, you know, I was just, you know, it's interesting because intellectually I understand parasocial relationships, but then when I speak to people in the circles that I run in a place like here in New York or wherever else, and there are people who listen to his podcast every day, every week, like they really felt this affinity for him that I didn't really feel because I was not a regular listener of his show. And just to see the— I didn't realize how important he was until after he'd passed, is basically what I'm saying.

Yeah.

Is now people are telling me like, I can't believe you got to meet him, he was so important, so amazing, and so forth. And, um, yeah, just, uh, strange to be, uh, um, uh, to not realize that until much later.

Yeah, I think the death has revealed the reach of him in a way that I wouldn't have been otherwise aware of. And I got a little sense of it in fall of 2024 because there was a lot of speculation and criticism of how Trump had turned over his get-out-the-vote operation to this Zoomer who does the DebateMe stuff. And it all seemed rather, rather goofy, and it was being mocked by the old political journalists until Boom, young men really did shift, and he owned a large part of that shift. And I think that gave him even more purchase and influence within that administration. But I didn't know, I didn't know how many young people listened to him. I also actually didn't know how many apolitical young people listen. That's the part to me that I would not have known. I wouldn't have known. It makes sense to me now. I think some people listening are going, what the hell are you talking about? This is a phenomenon I've been clued into I have a little bit of insight in just my, my own son is too young for politics, but they love YouTube content that's about gamification and about challenges in a way, because they don't have the attention span to sit down and watch sports for 3 hours. This becomes sports. MrBeast, it's all about challenges. And the Charlie Kirk stuff was, well, this is a guy debating 20 people. It's just classic YouTube content. And while I don't relate to content that way, I can't imagine relating to content that's political inherently without any sense of politics to it and just enjoying watching the— yeah, the slapping going on. Yeah, watching them mix it up like you're at the Coliseum. There are a lot of young people who weren't Republicans or didn't have a deeply felt politics who just— they just liked watching My friend was telling me this. I wish I knew the scene he was referencing, but just liked watching the fur fly. And that was a big cohort of the people who had a parasocial connection to him.

Yeah. One of the things that, that I was surprised by, so I visited their headquarters. So the studio was in Phoenix. They have their headquarters out there. And after he and I recorded our conversation, some of the TP USA staff showed me around the about, you know, the building and what they were doing. And they showed me, um, you know, the, the amount of organizing they put into 2024 to get Trump elected. And essentially, so they're based in Arizona, and it's, it's basically a certainty that without Charlie Kirk, Trump would not have won Arizona, um, simply because the amount of organizing and, uh, knocking on doors and campaigning. And, you know, it's so funny, uh, you know, hearing the, the stories they were telling me, how they would go into, uh, you know, Republican zip codes in the city of low turnout voters, people who registered Republican but hadn't voted in like the last 2 or 3 elections. And they would go there and say, you know, are you going to vote in November? And they would say, oh, I already voted. And they would say, what are you talking about? And then they would say, I voted already. And then they would realize, oh, they're talking about the primaries. They voted for Trump in the primaries and they thought that was the presidential election. And, you know, there's a lot of low information voters who don't understand that, oh, there's a primary and a general. Like that is above a lot of people's heads. The other thing they told me was, you know, they'd spend a lot of time at Trump rallies, the TPUSA staff, and they told me that about a third of the adults who go to Trump rallies, they don't vote for Trump. Um, they like Trump and they like going to the rallies and the spectacle and having fun and being around other MAGA people, but they don't vote because they think that the system is corrupt or that the vote doesn't matter or that the oligarchs are going to do whatever they want anyway. And part of what Charlie Kirk's team did was convince these people actually voting matters. You guys should vote and give them information about, you know, the voting—

the thing you're here to do, you should probably do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, uh, you know, as someone who, like, you know, has some cursory awareness of politics and important dates and elections and stuff, like, yeah, it's just forgetting that, wow, there's a lot of people out there who are just so disengaged from everything. And, um, you know, even I, I guess, like, what I thought of Charlie Kirk before I met him and went to visit their headquarters, I thought of him as more like a Ben Shapiro type of just like, oh, he has a popular podcast, he goes to campuses, he debates people. He's just a talking head, a commentator. And he was that. But he was also this amazing political force. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, he was extremely organized. He had a devoted staff, and he had a lot of volunteers and paid employees who would go around and knock on doors and try to get people to register to vote and turn out in the to the voting station and all that kind of stuff. The kind of thing that Democrats, I think, have historically been better at, of, um, you know, grassroots, uh, uh, politicking.

It's bizarre that he was both Trump's Karl Rove and his Rush Limbaugh, arguably. This is a very strange— I don't know how you even get that combination. And also very young. And there are aspects of this conversation that might be less interesting, but I think it's interesting in this way, is that young people can see and adjust for the changes in the I don't just reflexively praise young people and think they're right about everything, but I think the Charlie Kirk operation was successful in part because they understood how voting had changed. And it wasn't just a matter of persuasion. The Republicans needed to do better at vote by mail. They needed to do better at that. And the older consultants didn't really have a model of how to improve. And that was a huge focus of what Kirk was doing, was Look, we're gonna target these people, we're gonna get them to vote by mail, we're gonna change that conversation. And it's why there were indicators before the election, just in the early returns, that the delta was not what it was between the Democratic side and the Republican side. That wasn't just about persuasion, it was about functionally doing things different. And so there was almost a Moneyball story to that particular success. Now thinking about where to take the conversation in general from there. I mean, this political valence of the young male thing, you are right that Scott Galloway and there are Democratic figures who are open to that conversation now that the returns have come in and, and, you know, Democrats are on the wrong side of it. But I don't know if they, they really feel it in their hearts, Rob. I don't know. I don't know if the, the zero-sum thing is a problem. You talk about low-information voters not knowing things that perhaps should be intuitive. It should be intuitive that happier men make for happier women and vice versa. It should be intuitive that it's not zero-sum, that there's a positive feedback loop. But what do you make of a conversation where that's not what people think? That's not what they assume. And it's assumed instead that if the conversation shifts towards women are second-class citizens to actually it's men who are having problems, that women are somehow going to be, I don't know, disregarded or have their lives made worse.

Yeah, yeah. Your question about, uh, do they feel it in their hearts— I— it is hard to, um, believe that it's fully sincere. I mean, in part because so much of this discussion happened after the results of the 2024 election, when suddenly it's like, oh, we lost young men, how do we get them back, what happened? And, you know, there is this maybe this sense of it's calculated, it's not sincere. It's we don't really care about young men as far as like the issues on their own merits and how they're actually feeling. It's more so we need to care about them because we need their vote.

I'll interject and say I think with Scott Galloway, it's legitimately felt. I think he's been talking about this for a while.

But yes, the broader coalition. Yeah, the names I'd mentioned, I think that they are like Richard Reeves, I think as well. Scott Galloway, Richard Reeves, some of the other names that I pointed out there. But yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of, you know, more overt political figures, they talk about it, but it's not— it doesn't seem authentic. And so, you know, how do we, how do we make sense of this? And, you know, I think a lot of the— how do I talk? One of the interesting things is that the— if you look at actual self-identification politically, young men haven't changed all that much. If you just ask people straightforwardly, are you a liberal, are you a conservative? The number of men self-identifying as conservative hasn't changed that much over the last couple of decades. But a lot of young men did turn out for Trump, whereas in 2020 and 2016 they didn't. And one possibility here is that they're not, they're not dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. They are not, you know, political necessarily, but they just saw that one party doesn't seem to like them very much and the other party doesn't, uh, you know, even if they don't like them, at least don't seem to hate them. And so even if they don't think of themselves as conservatives or Republicans or what have you, they just think, all right, I'm gonna vote for this guy. These are like the, like the podcast bros, you know, the people who listen to Joe Rogan, and they don't have, you know, deep thoughts about politics, but they just don't want, uh, you know, the party in power to be the one that seems to, you know, outwardly, um, you know, say that they don't like young men or it's time for women to take over, the future is female, and that kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, at the Kamala Harris rallies, there are these big— I'm trying to— it's like a billboard thing and big lights saying, 'Trust women, trust women,' which is almost implicit. You could say it's not implicit, that you don't trust the other side of it, but it's this leaning on identity that isn't exactly, uh, inclusive, as it were. And when I talk— when I raise this to people, when I do my market research at the cafe next to my office, uh, which is all these older boomer libs, great guys that like to debate the events of the day. And I, I actually asked them why they think this is happening, why in, in their life it used to be young men were just liberal and would only really drift in that direction. They can't talk about it without this narrative of having been snookered, having been tricked. And I don't see it that way. I just see it as they went with the party that actually seems to like them versus the party that overtly doesn't. And we can talk policy, we can get into debates over which laws are better for who, but it doesn't take a whole lot. It wouldn't take a whole lot to just seem like you like everybody and you don't have this just odd identitarian vision of who needs to succeed, who needs to thrive. And I think that a lot of people in my life who are Team Blue are almost blind. They're almost blind to that. They're almost blind to how it comes off to other people, or how radical it comes off to other people when there's a Supreme Court justice up for a nomination, and it has to be a very narrow census category. What that might seem like to everybody else, I, I don't think that they're aware of that.

Yeah, I also wonder if it's, you know, kind of this availability bias of if you're an affluent, educated, left-leaning person and you look around and just compare the men and women who you interact with day to day, it does seem like the men are doing better than the women. Um, you know, elite men versus elite women, you know, elite men, uh, they seem to be doing at least as well, if not better, than the elite women are. And so it's hard to, uh, first, you know, you have no exposure to, um, you know, men more generally in society who aren't doing that well.

Broke-ass men, you know, broke-ass men would, uh, give more of an indicator. Yeah, and I think that this is gonna, I think, segue beautifully into the topic you just wrote about, which is how much of the discord in our society is just powered by resentment in the elite games versus whatever's going on in the lower levels. Uh, the Peter Turchin overproduction of elites thesis for what discombobulates society. I, I read your, uh, essay about it and I thought it was so interesting. I just had a bunch of thoughts. I want to talk about it. It's just, uh, you were quoting sociologist— is it Moussa Al-Gharbi? Is that— yeah, there we go. In his 2024 book We Have Never Been Woke argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. Uh, and you write, this may look like a trivial problem, the petty disappointments of a small slice of America, but the unhappiness of this group raised to expect the world and denied it has outsized consequences. There's a lot more. I might read more parts of it, but if we look at, let's say, the Luigi Mangione assassination. We don't totally know all the dynamics in this, uh, similar to the recent one of Kirk. But my eyes have definitely been open to how much damage can be done by having more people competing for these spots that exist and having their lives go in the direction they didn't think they would go. And I even remember, Rob, I remember I was never supportive of this. I was never supportive— man, it might have been 15 years ago when there were people out of the Occupy movement who were throwing rocks at Google buses. There were these tech workers, they were taking