How Luxury Beliefs are Ruining Society, with Rob Henderson

Hey, everyone.

Today I'm sitting down with the author, Rob Henderson. I got to know him on X because he started writing about a lot of the things that I was seeing and worried about in politics in California and San Francisco. Ultimately, you have a group of people who are making virtue signaling decisions about the most important things in our society and their arguments operating off of a day to day lived experience that is basically disconnected from the people that they aim to try to help. They say they're helping, but the outcomes seem like they're the opposite. Rob Henderson's book Troubled is a really important one because it talks exactly about why that happens and how that happens. How do people acquire luxury beliefs? I had a great conversation with him and he's got a book that, that is selling so well, it should be on the New York Times bestseller list. But someone is holding the finger down on the scale. Why? Because this idea of luxury beliefs is so important, it endangers the very being of a lot of people who are the elite who actually decide who goes on that list, who gets that headline and sometimes who. Who gets that funding from the government. So let's get started.

Rob, thanks a lot for coming on the channel. Really big fan of you from the Internet. And then it's always a treat to be able to spend time with a kindred spirit. Your book really, really spoke to me. And thanks for being here.

Yeah, thanks, Gary. Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah. I'm honored that you're taking the time to speak with me today.

I guess there's a lot in your story that really resonates for me. I remember, you know, it's a little different in that I did have both my parents, on the other hand, you know, my father struggled with alcoholism and, you know, it really subjected me and my brother to a lot and frankly my mom to a ton of trauma that as Asian Americans, often we just sort of go into American society assuming, you know, what, like, I'm normal, I'm fine. And then it came out in lots of really strange ways. Your book sort of talks about that at length. I wonder where to start. You sort of even start the preface right off the bat with, you know, sort of your three names. I wonder if you could talk about that.

Yeah. I opened the book this way just to give the reader a sense of, you know, what the story is and who the author of this book is. So my full name is is Robert Kim Henderson. And each of my three names was taken from a different adult. My first name, Robert, is the supposed name of my biological father. So I was born into poverty. My mother and I, we were homeless for a short while. We lived in a car. We eventually settled in a slum apartment in la. And later when I was put in the foster care system, some social workers and forensic psychologists asked my mom, and where's this boy's father? Because you're not in a position to care for him. And she said she really didn't know. She had some vague sense that his name was Robert, but she didn't have any memory of him or where he was or what he did. My mother, she came to the US from Seoul, South Korea as a young woman to study. And then she started partying and doing a lot of drugs. And that's, you know, kind of where her life went and why I was put into care. And my father actually had no information about him other than his name, supposedly. But I took a 23andMe test last year and learned that I'm half Hispanic on my father's side. So I'm half Mexican, half Korean. And my middle name, Kim, that's my birth mother's name, you know, common Korean surname. And my last name, Henderson, comes from my adoptive father. So when I was taken from my birth mother, I was placed into the Los Angeles county foster care system. Spent the next just shy of five years in seven different homes around la. Then I was adopted by this working class family and we settled in this kind of dusty blue collar town in Northern California called Red Bluff, way up north, about two hours north of Sacramento. It's a part of California most people aren't familiar with, but it's a very kind of rundown, poor, kind of, kind of rural area. And my adoptive parents, you know, they experience kind of what a lot of families are experiencing across the country, sort of working class and lower middle class families, the deterioration and the instability and the separation. I mean, they. So they divorced about 18 months after adopting me. My adoptive father was upset with my adoptive mother for leaving him, and he retaliated by cutting off contact with me because he figured this would, you know, this would inflict some pain on my mother, which it did. And so from there I was raised by a single mom for a time. And there were other sort of family transitions after the fact there, but those were the names that were given to me. And each of those three names were taken from adults that I no longer speak with and have, you know, essentially either neglected or abandoned me during my childhood.

One of the crazy things about American societies, I think really doesn't give people who experience things like that trauma from childhood. Like, we just, they just, it doesn't get very much space. It's like not something that people talk about. If anything, when we go off into polite society, we spend a lot of time pretending we, you know, fit in. And none of that stuff happened. My freshman year at Stanford, I had a academic residential advisor who, you know, explicitly the, the goal of that person is to be a resource or someone to like, help you get used to, you know, university life. And then I remember sending them emails about, you know, sort of the stuff I was dealing with around, like, verbal abuse from my parents and like sort of really, really intense familial obligations and there was just no engagement. There's like a long stretch of the butch where. So you sort of talk about like your high school years, but you did end up also at Yale. So, you know, that's sort of like the two ends of the spectrum, right? Both of us experiencing quite a bit of trauma early and then, you know, joining polite society in some way and like realizing, oh, you know, we really don't quite fit in. There is actually a lot of difference between our experience and like the normal elite experience at top schools.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting, right? Like I, when I started writing this book, this lingering concern I had was like, would anyone relate to any of this? Because I had such an unusual upbringing. At one point I took this, this childhood instability scale that I came across in a developmental psychology paper and yeah.

ACE score then, right?

It's, it's. So this is separate from the ace. It's very similar, it's very similar to the ACE scores, the Adverse Childhood Experiences score. And I did the, you know, the basic statistics and found that I scored in the top 1% of most unstable childhoods in the U.S. and I'm like, man, this is like, you know, people are going to read this and be like, this is such an alien experience to me. But what I've been surprised by is just how many people have connected with this story. And not even people who grew up, you know, working class or poor the way that I did for long stretches of my upbringing, but even people who had kind of more middle class upbringings but, you know, they experienced family stability or someone in their family suffered from addiction, or a lot of people's parents have had their own issues that they were dealing with and took it out on their kids or their spouse. And you're right, it's, it's something that's, that's under discussed and people either don't speak about it at all. Or if they do, they use. They speak about it indirectly in the language of like poverty or inequality. But you know, there are people who don't necessarily lack in terms of material resources, but they're acting out the emotional difficulties and experiences they had early in their lives, the instability and the self defeating choices and all those things. And then when they have families, you see, they take it out on their kids and. Or they don't. They just, you know, they take it out of their kids by not speaking to the kids. Right. That. By abandoning them or neglecting them. And that's sort of how they're acting out. I saw kind of every angle of that, not just from my own experience growing up in LA and then in Red Bluff, but also my friends. You know, I talk about my experiences in the foster homes and the divorces and separations and being raised by a single mom and all that stuff. But I had five close friends growing up in Red Bluff, and they also had very difficult experiences, you know, raised by single moms or abusive stepparents or. I had one friend who was raised by his grandmother because his mom was on drugs, his dad was in prison. Actually, I had two friends whose dads were kind of in and out of prison all throughout our childhood. So I write about those experiences too, about how this is actually more common than a lot of people think, especially people in that sort of tippy top, you know, at or near the elite segments of society. And I kind of came to realize this vast sort of chasm between elites and everyone else when I got to Yale and to Cambridge too, to sort of see as sort of step by step the foster homes, this working class community. Then I was in the Air Force, then I went off to Yale and I kind of saw like different strata of American society all along the way. And so, yeah, the book covers a lot of. A lot of what I saw and what I learned.

Yeah, your time in the Air Force sounds really interesting in that it's structure. And then I guess in my own experience, I found that I really like situations that are sort of like high love, low structure. That was sort of what I craved. But it was a surprise to me, entering into like the workforce and becoming a manager and trying to run companies and realizing that actually that's not normal. Like basically what people seem to love is high love, high structure. People actually really want structure. Whereas a deep part of me is like sort of angst against authority because of my own upbringing. So I just didn't want anyone to Tell me what to do or control me and how much that made me who I am in a lot of ways.

Yeah, I had this kind of love, hate relationship with authority. I had this kind of instinctive mistrust of adults just from being in the system so long from. You know, each time I moved to a different foster home, it did feel like this sense of betrayal, especially once I grew old enough to understand what was happening to me and just the sort of fleeting connections that I had where I'd go to one home, one family, then the next family, and then, yeah, later, when I was adopted, losing contact with my adoptive father. And so by the time I was in middle school or high school and teachers would ask me to do homework or do these things, I was just very skeptical of this whole enterprise. Anytime an adult said this was important, I would think. I have this line in the book about how for a lot of kids, if adults repeatedly let you down, you eventually learn to let yourself down. And that's what happened with me. It's what happened with a lot of my friends, that if you're a young child and your parents or the adult people in your life, they're your whole world and they don't put your priorities first. Then as you kind of come online and enter the world, you stop really prioritizing your own needs. At least long term needs, maybe short term hedonistic gratification, just the pursuit of short term pleasure to forget about your circumstances and to forget about all the things going on around you. And so, yeah, this was something that we dealt with and it took a while to overcome some of it. I mean, it was interesting. Like the Air Force. When I initially joined, I hated it, actually. I wasn't actually expecting it to be quite that rigid and quite that intense. I joined at a unique time too. I mean, I left. I was 17 years old when I enlisted. I had to have my adoptive mom sign a permission slip because I was underage. And this was 2007. So this was like the height of the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, like, the Air Force had revamped their training regimen. And it was like. It was more intense than I expected, and I didn't like it. But I have this story in the book where I talk to my friend Tyler, who. He served 12 months in San Quentin State in prison in California. And he had just gotten out of prison. I'm telling the story and I visit him. I was one or two years into my enlistment, and we both were describing our respective experiences. He was Talking about prison, I was talking about the military. And we both kind of realized like, oh, we had very similar experiences where every aspect of your life is tightly controlled from what time the lights come off to like, you know, like where you're supposed to be and who you report to and every, every little thing. And we both came to this agreement that we both really hated it at first, but gradually we came to actually appreciate the structure and the stability that we had lacked when we were growing up. And he liked it so much, he actually went back to prison. And I liked it so much I actually reenlisted. So I served eight years in total. I did four. Two. Four year enlistments.

Thanks for your service.

No, thank you. Yeah, thanks, man. Yeah, and so it's like, you know, when you grow up in like, with a complete lack of norms, like, no parents, really. I mean, we had parents around, but they were kind of halfway checked out. That on some level we were, I think, craving that stability, that structure in our lives. And even if we kind of rebelled against it and pushed against it at first, we gradually grew to appreciate that there was something comforting about it too. So, yeah, it's, it's. It's not straightforward. Right. It was like, oh, structure, how, how fun and how great and everything. It was more like, I really hate this. But then as you sort of live through it, it's like, oh, this has actually been good for me on some level, at least in our experience. You know, it doesn't work for everyone. I definitely don't recommend like everyone join the military or go to prison or anything like that. But for certain kinds of people, I think limits can be useful.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, for folks who have like sort of super stable households and. Or I mean, being a parent now, I realize to what degree I actually have to learn how to be a parent totally from first principles in a lot of ways. And that's been really hard. I think the thing I struggled the most with now is so is sort of knowing how to actually be authoritative instead of authoritarian or self abandoning. Right. And then in parenting, that's like one of the primary issues. Some people have parents who are way too permissive. Some people. Or not present. Right. Or you have parents who are way extremely overbearing and have their own issues, and then really good parenting is sort of someplace in the middle. And then being a really good manager is like someplace in the middle as well.

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. Yeah. I remember taking a developmental psychology course and like probably every parent knows this or everyone who sort of flipped through a parenting book, they have that like the three kind of basic categories of parenting. Like there, yeah, there was the authoritarian parenting, which is just this, yeah, very overbearing, abusive or borderline abusive. And then, yeah, authoritative, which is, you know, having boundaries and limits but not going overboard. And then, yeah, that sort of laissez faire, complete, hands off style. And I think like when I, when I speak to a lot of especially kind of like more upper upper middle class parents, they are concerned about that boundary between authoritarian and authoritative where if you behave in an authoritative way, I think a lot of parents worry that they're being authoritarian when they're not. And so trying to find that, that line, I'm not a parent, so I don't know, but I think I have like some understanding just from speaking that that can be a very kind of difficult tightrope.

What's funny is it's fractal, right? We spend a lot of time with AI and in artificial intelligence you spend a lot of time thinking about training. And training runs like parenting is basically training a human intelligence. And it takes its own like, you know, more than 20,000 hours of really intense back to back attention. And you know, of course the outcomes are going to be radically different based on what training you subject the human intelligence to. Actually, it's a very, very strong, nonstop reinforcement learning, you know, and then it's fractal because, you know, I, I think one of the, my favorite things from your substack and some of the ideas that you've been putting out on the Internet I, that really resonate with me are really about this idea of luxury beliefs. And there's sort of this link between people's attitudes towards parenting to actually discipline of children, to actually all the way over to public safety and you know, criminal justice reform. What is the role of the state in protecting people or correcting behavior or diverting them from path A versus path B? I think that that debate actually really needs to happen because right now they seem very disconnected. And I feel like that's where the luxury beliefs sort of come from. If you have an elite that defines the narrative, that sets the rules, sets the boundaries for society, and then has no connection to your experience or my experience or, you know, the experience of actually a large percentage of the population, then the policies do not serve the people. And then people are confused and surprised and, or invoke a lot of the sort of invective that they do around calling someone carceral or. And it's tricky because obviously we want a police that is, you know, they do their jobs right. We don't want an abusive police structure, but we also want one that like, keeps people safe. And then, you know, even at the level of school, like in San Francisco, we have this crazy problem of middle schools that are very violent, actually. And then even if you wanted to achieve in those environments, the environments are so disruptive and so not conducive to learning that, you know, guess what, like the test scores, wars are bad, and, you know, it's not possible and we sort of allow it. Right. And so there's a deep connection between luxury beliefs and like a breakdown in society at these sort of fundamental levels for our children and for our elders and for ourselves in blue cities having.

Some limits, some boundaries, some consequences for misbehavior. I mean, this is like sort of basic behavioral science that people respond to incentives and if you sort of remove all penalties for every possible form of misconduct, like some small percentage of the population will start to essentially abuse or manipulate people around them. And I think we can kind of see that, yeah, in the wake of the sort of defund the police movement. And I mean, it's so funny, like, I talk about this in the book I report the statistics around Defund the Police. There was this really large scale survey, representative survey from YouGov in 2020 which found that. And when they broke down the responses by income category, the highest income Americans were the most in support of defunding the police. There were kind of smaller surveys done in specific cities during that period, New York City, Detroit, I think Minneapolis too. And they found that the group that was the most in support of defunding the police were white Democrats, and that black and Hispanic residents of these cities were the least in favor of it. And yet the people, the activists and people who take on the mantle of being representatives for these marginalized and disadvantaged groups, they hold the opposite view. Where actually what's happening is you need to reduce resources to the police and cultivate an attitude towards suspicion toward law enforcement. And, you know, then we saw what happened in the wake of that, that violent crime spiked, homicides rates increased between 2020 and 2022. And it was like, you know, I remember reading, like, I'd open the pages of the Wall street journal in like 2022 and it would say, you know, year over year, homicides increased X percent over the last two years. And, you know, these would be folded into these aggregate snapshot statistics. But then over the last, I don't know, year or so There were these high profile murders of like. There was one, I think there was a, there was a tech executive in San Francisco. I don't recall the specifics of that case, but he got stabbed in, in San Francisco.

That one turned out to be a crime of passion, apparently.

Oh, interesting. Okay. And.

But there are very horrible examples of actually totally random violence. Sharia Moskoya was a UPenn grad, moved to San Francisco to follow his dreams, had a new newborn, and he got run over and killed on the west side of the city by a repeat offender who was just totally out of his mind on drugs. And if you don't have, yeah, if you literally just don't have consequences for people who have a rap sheet that is a mile long, then in exchange for the virtue signal of politicians, you have random deaths, dozens to hundreds of random deaths and maimings. And you know, these are sort of things that actually break down society in that way. Because a child being raised by a single father or mother who gets killed, well, that's an orphan, right. That's another person who enters the foster system. Like there's, you know, a real breakdown here that, you know, society needs to look out for each other and it's not happening. And it's, you know, not happening largely because the elites who sort of set the narrative and write the headlines, you know, all of the things that you're talking about are more or less foreign to them.

Yeah. And they don't seem to recognize sort of their own class biases. You know, so you mentioned this person, this UPenn graduate. There were those two high profile cases of journalists being killed in the last few months. And those people get identified by name in the media. You know, they have articles written about them. We learn their names. And you know, I was reading these reports and I'm thinking, okay, if you're, you know, if you're just a poor person in a low income neighborhood and you get shot or stabbed or attacked, you know, you just get folded into the statistics. But if you're a member of the modern aristocracy and you're a college graduate and you're a journalist or you graduate from an elite school, even if, you know, even if and when these policies do catch up and occasionally involve or, you know, victimize one of these people, you know, they get treated very differently. They get these, you know, entire articles written about them and it's like they get honored as like, you know, a member of the nobility was killed and they get like an entire, entire piece written about them. And meanwhile, like Dozens of ordinary people are being victimized too, and they're not sort of described in the same way or, or sort of venerated in the media in the same terms. And you know, it's funny, like the. I'm curious about, like just, you know, because I studied psychology and I'm interested in how these things work from a sort of psychological perspective of my impression is that at least for a large segment of cultural elites, that when a police officer kills someone, like that's seen as somehow more egregious than if sort of one low income person that is disproportionately unlawful and a disproportionate percentage of that 1% happens to be people from marginalized or dispossessed groups. The thinking seems to be, well, we just won't enforce laws anymore, but they're victimizing people around them. And the people they're victimizing also tend to be disproportionately poor from marginalized backgrounds as well. You know, other. I cite these stats in the book too, about how compared to Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the lowest income Americans are 7 times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault, 7 times more likely to be victims of robbery, 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault and homicide. And essentially, like every crime you can think of, the poor are the most likely to be victimized by it. And in the book too, about how compared to Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the lowest income Americans are 7 times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault, 7 times more likely to be victims of robbery, 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault and homicide. And essentially, like every crime you can think of, the poor are the most likely to be victimized by it, and people are much more likely to be victimized by crime than perpetrators. But we focus so much on the perpetrators of crime and how they come from these marginalized and deprived backgrounds. But we don't think that much about their victims and what happens with them. They don't get the same amount of attention, I think, which is a shame. I mean, if there's a criminal who commits an act, I think we should spend more time on the victim and their circumstances rather than the perpetrator.

Yeah, I agree 100%. I mean, a lot of this is ultimately sort of a breakdown in both state capacity and media capacity. I think there's sort of epistemic capture at the media level where, you know, things that do not match the dominant current thing narrative are squelched and one of the reasons why I'm excited to sort of showcase you on my YouTube channel is hearing recently that Troubled actually hit all of the metrics necessary to be on the New York Times Bestseller list, probably by a wide margin. And yet, you know, what's going on there?

Yeah, that's a good question. We are, you know, we're investigating that. So last year, you know, my agent and, you know, the team from my publisher, we all sat down and thought about doing a kind of a mini book tour and go to some bookstores, do some signings, maybe do talks. And none of the bookstores we reached out to and reached out to a lot were willing to host me. And then more recently, the book's been out now for a little over a week, and it sold extremely well. It hit the USA Today Bestseller list, and it was number one on a bunch of categories on Amazon. It was number one this week on Bookshop, this sort of aggregate, sort of independent bookseller list. So it's doing very well. My publisher contacted me saying, yeah, we should have hit the New York Times Bestseller List, but somehow we didn't. And they're inquiring, and we're trying to get to the bottom of why this oversight, if it is an oversight occurred. But, you know, it's possible, just like with the bookstores being unwilling to host me for my tour. This issue with the bestseller list may just be another example, I think, of the message of my book may be unwelcome. You know, this idea of luxury beliefs, of, you know, I describe kind of the hypocrisy and the duplicity of people who are at or near the top of society, who wield the most cultural and political influence, who kind of do the most in terms of shaping the discourse and raising the issues that we as a society should be caring about and what goals we should be aspiring to. And I challenge some of their perspectives, like you and I have been talking about Defund the Police. But I talk about other issues around family and about other kinds of issues that are plaguing marginalized and dispossessed communities across the US And I think they're just the people who get wind of my book and the message. And, you know, they're not, you know, 100% supportive of the things I'm. I'm communicating, which I think is, you know, it's a shame. It's a shame that this is the book I think should be uncontroversial, but somehow it is seen by some as provocative.

The people who need to hear it the most are the ones who might be most resistant to the message. And then one of the reasons why it really resonated with me is that I've seen it firsthand as a resident of San Francisco. You know, one of the more shocking things for me growing up in the Bay Area, it was hearing that if you live in San Francisco and you have children who are in junior high school and you can't afford very, very expensive private schools, you know, San Francisco is, has some of the highest rates of the elites sending their children to private school. Basically, like if you can, you do in San Francisco. If that were expanded over all of America, like that wouldn't be a good thing. Like, I deeply believe that my public school education helped me a lot. Part of the reason why I was able to get into Stanford and study computer science was being able to take algebra in seventh and eighth grade. And here in San Francisco you cannot take it until ninth grade. And the argument was that it would help black and brown kids with equity. And you know, the result was exactly the opposite of that, that it hurt everyone at every level. It watered down the schools, it reduced state capacity, it was an abdication of duty to the people. Which you could argue is the same thing that we saw around a breakdown in the criminal justice system. One thing that you talk a lot about is, you know, standardized tests actually really help testing and good education, merit based schools. These are things that clearly allow people from non traditional backgrounds get a leg up. And yet why are these things being sort of torn down?

Yeah, it's ridiculous. I've written multiple pieces in defense of standardized testing. Most recently I wrote an op ed in the Boston Globe. You know, both drawing on the data, which are crystal clear, that standardized testing is beneficial, especially for low income kids and kids from underrepresented groups, you know, and then I also draw my own personal experience with testing. I mean, I was kind of, my own academic record was very kind of unstable. I graduated high school, kind of barely crossed the finish line with a 2.2 GPA. And I never really had this conception of myself as like a good student or smart or anything like that. But I took the asvab, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, which is a military standardized test. And there's been a lot of interesting research on that test. And it's highly correlated with SAT scores, with cognitive ability, all these kinds of things. And I took this test and did really well on it. And that was the first time that I realized, you know, because my, my recruiter, my Air Force recruiter showed me how to convert those score scores into SAT results. And he was like, yeah, this is really good score. And then later when I was applying to college, people ask me, how did you get into Yale with a 2.2 GPA in high school? And one reason was because I took the SAT later and I got a really good score. And I had taken some night classes at a community college and kind of did some other things too to kind of bolster my application. But the SAT score was really a thing that helped my application shine through and let some of these colleges that I applied to, you know, they were willing to take a risk on me despite my shoddy high school performance. One of my favorite studies around this, there was A study from 2016 led by the economist David Card. And he and his co authors, they ran this study some school district in Chicago where apparently the gifted program at this district, initially, the only way you could get into a gifted program as a kid is if you either had a teacher recommendation, it had to be parent and teacher recommendation. So it was based on this kind of subjective decision by these adults. And what David Card and his co authors did was essentially administer tests to all of these kids, standardized tests to every kid in the school district. And this actually increased the number of black and Hispanic and low income kids to qualify for this gifted program. Essentially, these kids were being overlooked and they deserve this gifted status. But because of, you know, whatever personal bias or misconceptions about what a gifted child is supposed to look like, these kids were being overlooked by teachers, by parents, by everyone else. I mean, part of it is that if you're a parent and you're, you know, you're, you're not aware of like how the system works, or maybe you're not even familiar with gifted programs, even if you have a smart kid, it may not even occur to you to tell the teacher, hey, I think my kid is smart. Should we get them into a gifted program? But if every kid is required to take a test and automatically if you score above a certain cutoff, you're just automatically enrolled. You can get a lot more kids who ordinarily wouldn't go to these programs. And I just think, yeah, this is like the test revealed something about these kids that you, you know, that, that personal, subjective evaluations alone can't, can't necessarily do.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's very interesting to watch people talk about merit as a racist idea. It's very upsetting actually to see that sort of invective being used against these concepts that actually, really, really help people get ahead in society. And it's sort of like believing that you can ban and destroy all thermometers and no children will ever have a fever ever again. It's like, that's not how it works.

Like, the underlying construct still exists, right? Like the thing that you care about and that predicts success academically and professionally and everywhere else. Even if you don't test it, it's still going to shine through. And actually, if you don't teach kids to read and you don't teach kids basic numeracy and all of the kind of skills that you should equip them with, then they're going to fall even further behind. I mean, we've seen this over the last few years with whatever woke kindergarten and shutting down the schools. And, you know, I remember there was this story of back in LA county where I grew up, at least for part of my childhood, where, you know, the school district just decided to give 10,000 iPads to the kids and didn't really monitor how closely these kids were using these tablets to do well in school. They were supposed to improve learning outcomes, but instead these kids were just playing games. And it kind of allowed the teachers to take this hands off approach of, oh, go on the iPad and do xyz and instead the kids would just play games. And, you know, that probably made someone feel good about themselves, that they were doing something, but in the end it just ended up backfiring. And, you know, like, a lot of these policies are backfiring that we, you know, I think a lot of these people have good intentions and they want to help these kids, but unfortunately, like, what makes you feel good and what actually leads to improved outcomes for disadvantaged kids, those aren't always the same thing. And sometimes you have to feel, you know, this is something that I've started to learn through speaking with teachers at charter schools and parents and people who like a little bit of tough love can be okay sometimes that even if a kid in the moment doesn't like you, if you're telling them to do their homework or you're telling them they need to study or hit the books or whatever, it happens to be that even if in the moment they're mad at you and you feel bad and all those things, like in the end, in the long term, this is good for them, right? Like, it's good to learn to read, it's good to learn to do math and learn basic science and all those things. Even if in the moment the kid is upset with you, and you'd much rather just hand them an iPad and mentally clock out, but that doesn't help them.

Yeah, I've often thought about that phenomenon as everyone could use a little bit of an Asian parent. Maybe not all the way, maybe not the extreme that I got, but just a little bit. Just a little encouragement, a little bit of negative motivation around, you know, oh, you didn't make it there. Like a little bit of shame. Not a lot of shame. Not like traumatic levels of shame, but a little bit like, just enough. And a little bit goes a long way on a lot of that stuff. Stuff which is kind of funny.

Yeah, I think. Yeah, just like a little bit of tiger parenting, a little bit of standards and expectations and discipline and yeah, you don't have to go overboard with it, but it's, you know, having a little bit of that is much better than just, you know, doing what feels good and neglecting your responsibilities to the kids for how are they going to succeed in the world? I mean, I had a lot of that kind of neglect when I was a kid of I had to teach myself how to read. Like, once I learned how important reading was, I started to do it. But, you know, there was this story I tell in the book about how, you know, I was in second grade, I didn't know how to read, and the teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said I wanted to be a scientist. And she's like, if you want to be a scientist, you have to learn to read. And. But I also thought, like, what else could I do that doesn't require reading? And then I learned, actually, every job requires reading, essentially, and more and more. And now, Right. Like, you have to have some basic level of competence to do basically any job in the modern economy. But at that time, I was just a kid, kind of lost and, and gradually taught myself, but that was just, you know, a bunch of adults abdicating their responsibilities, and that's not a great thing to do. We need. We need to be focusing more on how to. How to help our kids. And, you know, even if not every kid does go off to attend some expensive elite university, that having basic skills, that's. That's critical. You know, it's important.

I think that that is one of the scarier things that I've come to realize over the course of years. Even going to Stanford, I didn't really realize to what degree how much of an advantage that was. And then now, of course, I'm like, oh, I got to work at a Peter Thiel startup very early. It was a lot easier to raise money. There's all these biases about the elite sort of helps its own. And being able to join the elite was a big deal. And then of course that feeds into the status anxiety that the elite feels for its own children. And then somewhere along the way that status anxiety became toxic. You know, we somehow disconnected the things that result in good outcomes and we sort of like covered it in ideology. When did that happen? Like, I just don't. I feel like that wasn't a thing when we were young and when we were children and when we were teenagers. And then at some point in the last 20 to 30 years, there was sort of emerging of specifically race based ideology and what really should be a system that serves the people and has good outcomes. And not only that, the recurring thing here is that if you point out that there's a disconnect from the outcomes, you are attacked for lacking the correct ideology.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that timeline you mentioned, the 20 to 30 years, I mean the like some version of meritocracy, it hasn't been perfect, but it was kind of. It started in the 1960s with the SAT, where prior to the SAT and sort of wide scale adoption of standardized testing, the elite schools, it was essentially, you know, this gentleman's agreement that as long as you came from the right WASP family or the right, you know, whatever, like you were a man of character, that you were able to go to places like Harvard and Stanford and Yale and then, yeah, starting in the 1960s, it was more about sort of merit based admissions. But I do wonder if once those people started to have children, I think meritocracy in general, and I know we don't have a perfect meritocracy, but we have come as close as any society has to achieving it. And because it's uncomfortable and because if you've made it in that kind of system, but you have kids and you're worried about their future, it can be useful, I think, to adopt fuzzier standards for admission and to expunge the SAT and instead rely more on recommendations and grades and extracurriculars. And if you have the resources to send your kid to some foreign country and have an adventure that they can write about in their personal statement. So it does seem like there's this kind of alliance between very wealthy families and then they're using the kind of. They're just sort of disguising their self interest in the language and the ideology of our time. Around social justice and identity politics, and they get to feel good about themselves while simultaneously kind of giving their own kids a leg up. I mean, I just saw this article in New York magazine that kids from the top 1% of the income scale applicants. College applicants from the top 1% of the income scale are 34% more likely to be admitted to an elite university than an average applicant with the same test score. That advantage is built in, and it's only going to magnify if the test is eliminated. I mean, the test is imperfect and so on, but without it, the disparities grow even larger. So, yeah, I think the status anxiety is interesting, too. I mean, I. I saw that, you know, I had this perspective. You know, I set foot on campus at Yale after the foster homes and the military and all, you know, this kind of unusual background. And I remember thinking, like, wow, I haven't made. I can't believe I'm at Yale. Like, I can't believe I'm at college. First of all, just like the fact that, you know, I'm actually studying at a university, but then it's Yale. No one goes to a place like this and then ends up, you know, unable to pay their bills or living on the streets. Like, I know that my future by this point is as secure as it had ever been. And yet when I would speak with the other students or with, you know, recent graduates or, you know, the law school student, like, you know, basically anyone with an affiliation, professors too, honestly, there was this underlying feeling of, like, this constant, you know, whatever rat race, like running in that hamster wheel of I'm not doing enough. You know, there's that next milestone, that next accomplishment, that next thing I need to do without any moment of just sort of stepping back and saying, wow, I'm like, I'm here and I'm okay, and I've, you know, sort of entered these ivy walls and this special place. But it wasn't like that. It was more so. It was the most status anxiety I'd ever seen before. And I saw this study, I've seen two studies since then on the same issue that people who are at or near the top in terms of socioeconomic status and wealth, they report the highest levels of need for status and wealth. In other words, these studies, these researchers collected objective measures of wealth and status on the participants levels of income, education, occupational prestige, and found that people who were at or near the top on those metrics were the most likely to agree with statements like, it would please me to be in a position of Power over others. I enjoy having influence over those around me. You know, I enjoy being recognized when I walk into a room, like those kinds of things, that it's actually people who are doing very well, objectively speaking, who also have this longing, this desire for distinction. And once I read those studies, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. There's something there that sort of clicked into place for me.

What's the path out of this? Are we getting better? Is the discourse sort of turning? You know, what's your feeling as of right now?

I'm sure you're familiar and a lot of your listeners, people have been talking about a vibe shift or we've reached peak woke or, you know, various. There are variations of those ideas. I think that's probably right, that we're. Things seem to slowly, you know, we always overcorrect. We can never just have a nuanced and moderate response to anything. It seems like we always have to swing back and forth. And I'm hoping we are sort of gradually coming to our senses. I hope we don't overcorrect too far the other direction, but at the very least kind of step back from where we've been over the last few years. But I think it takes conversations like this. I think it takes more, and I hope I communicate this message, at least in an implicit way in my book, that part of the way we kind of overcome this self censorship, this new wave of political correctness or whatever you want to call it, that it just takes more people with influence kind of speaking out and being open and being honest and conversations like this of people who have some kind of platform to just kind of call out nonsense that actually, you know, it's good for kids to learn. It's, you know, it's not, it's not a great idea to dismantle law enforcement or what have you, just very kind of common sense ideas. But there was a period in 2020 and 2021 where a lot of people abdicated their responsibility to tell the truth despite their wide platform and large audience, that they just kind of went along and were afraid for reputational reasons. And on some level I understood that. I saw people lose their jobs, you know, in academia especially. I mean, I was in the middle of my PhD program and I was seeing a lot of the behind the scenes people getting pressured to resign or outright fired. I just think, yeah, have this kind of return of, I don't know how to say this term, noblesse oblige of just. If you've been endowed with certain advantages and privileges in your life, which I have undoubtedly, that, yeah, there's some duty to speak out a bit and to call out misguided decision making when you see it.

That sounds like maybe one of the themes of the book in some ways that it's not just that the elites don't see this side of society, it's actually that the elites should see it and sort of actually have a duty to steer society, to create state capacity that creates good outcomes. The interesting thing is like, you know, I'm still a moderate classic liberal in that I actually really deeply believe that society does have a duty to all its citizens. Like, I mean, it's. I don't think that that's that revolutionary. You know, we want a government that actually works. We want schools that work. We want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And then that doesn't come for free and we've got to fight for it.

Yeah. It's funny, like every. This is something I've only just now realized or you know, sort of adopted this view that, you know, I used to think it was ridiculous. Like, you know, again, I've been in kind of higher ed in the. These elite universities the last few years and I used to think it was ridiculous all the debates about academic freedom, freedom of expression, you know, the pursuit of truth, all of this. And like, why is this a debate? Of course we should have these things. Like how is this an argument in the first place that we need to have? But gradually I'm realizing that it's not. I don't think it comes naturally. You know, if you look at history, freedom of speech is like a very novel and strange, peculiar idea that it's only recently taken hold in kind of the post enlightenment era and only in a select few societies. And it doesn't come naturally, I think. And so it's like a tax you have to pay to live in a free society, that you constantly have to battle for it because there will always be reasons to curtail people's freedoms. Right. And so you constantly have to take some time aside and actually speak your mind or whatever it is, sign petition or show support and solidarity for someone who may be undergoing the slings and arrows of some cancel culture mob or whatever it is. Like I think of it as like a social tax or something that you just have to undergo it and. And realize. Yeah. That as absurd as some of the arguments are, they're actually not atypical, historically speaking, that that kind of. We're the weird ones for believing in, in all the, you know, the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and all that stuff. Like, we're the kind of atypical ones for supporting it in. In the scheme of things. So that's kind of how I've been thinking about it, at least in the last year or so, and it's been helping me to understand what's been happening.

Well, we're gonna keep fighting. Rob, thank you so much for this book. Everyone who's watching right now, go to Amazon. Your link's in the description to Rob's website. I think it's even a little bit better if you buy it from. Buy it direct. Is that right?

Or I think, yeah, if you go to, like, the Simon and Schuster website or buy it from bookshop or something, or, you know, even better, like a brick and mortar bookstore. But, you know, however you get your books, as long as you get it.

That sounds right. So, Rob, thanks a lot for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us, and we'll catch you on Twitter.

Thanks, Gary. This has been great.