#748 - Rob Henderson - How Privileged Thinking Drives Our Entire Culture
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is rob henderson. He's A P.

H. D graduate from university of cambridge, A U. S. Air for veteran and an author. The people who make the rules are not the ones impacted by the rules. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that conf status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower class, and there are everywhere, expect to learn rob's opinion on the recent catastrophes in american higher education, why luxury beliefs have become more common than ever before.

What rob learned during his journey through all class levels, what it's like to truly be in poverty, robs advice for how people can become Better readers and much more. Rob happens to be one of the smartest people on the internet. I love his twitter.

I love his sub. Stack is always deep in the research, finding cool stuff about social psychology of human nature and anthropology, evolutional, whatever. He's britten, and I will continue to bring him on the show until the sun and gulls the earth, because I like him, and I hope that you do too.

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What do you make of the last few months to fall out from yale and harvard in such?

I mean, yeah, we saw that big testimonial from the president. Yeah, was harvard M. I T. pen? Uh, I mean, I wasn't surprised by, I mean, a lot of people. I think we're finally fully realizing the coming to their people have been saying this for a while now.

Oh, you know, eventually the pencil wing back and people will finally figure out what's really go on in these institutions and this sort of ideology that's been spilling out of the universities. And now I think they finally are actually truly realizing IT. But yeah, I saw the kind of the birth of what a lot of people call wackiness.

Uh, in two and fifteen, when I ride on campus at E, I was my first semester I saw was happening there. And yeah I mean, I think you can draw straight line from some of those events in twenty fifteen to what we're seeing now. And you had been really ugly, but you know of amusing you know for my perspective because you know I was one of the i'd like to think that I was one of sort of early observers and people who could recognize was occurring any later on oner. So Jordan Peterson was was another and and there have been other critics of higher ed, especially easily universities um but it's been a really, really amusing and and and also sort of this .

harding to to see is this a sort of odbc of fatalism, shodden fraud, sort of pleasure this pleasure like ik pity yeah it's a real concatenation of of things and obviously we ve got a couple of mutual friends that have either been directly tangents involved Vincent, our mutual friend.

I managed to get removed from my high region institution because of him appearing on this podcast yeah Carol hovan ah who is, you know a really good mutual friends, has kind of been thrust into the middle. This SHE told me that he basically felt like she's been used like a football. And for the people who know who Carol's SHE went on, rogan, I think he cried like six times.

Joe show, SHE cried at least three times on mine. We went for breakfast and pretty sure he cried like three times at breakfast SHE just a very sort of emotional person. She's she's really sort of fAiling this. And yeah, you realize in a sort of proxy fucking battle like this, the people that are useful political football to be kicked around often end up paying a pretty Price. And none never thinks about them because you like, oh, no, but you know you're a flaming worry or for free speech or whatever and you go, well, yes, I didn't ask to be.

yeah yeah, very few people want to be fired. I mean, you a lot of people may not be familiar with just how difficult that is to get an activist job the first place. I mean, I friends with vince ent, I saw, I mean, he was hustling hard and he had a very impressive academic record and no one wants to be in that position.

I think the their critics with the detractors say like, oh, you know, oh por me with your cancelled culture and now look at ugly on all these podcast and playing up your victim hood and all of this. But that's not what IT is. I think it's for some people, is just the consolation that while I lost my dream job, at the very least I can sort of communicate with something exactly.

And yeah, I was observing all of this from a far I mean, one thing that I pointed out before is that for every like public academic cancellation, see, there are probably five to ten others that are not covered in the media. The most people actually don't enjoy the life like that much, especially academics who tend to be kind of weird nerds with their obscured any interest. They just want to keep their head down, do their research, be left alone and then suddenly they are accused of X, Y, Z.

And they just want to silently in habit, blow over. Um and that's like the sort of model case that's the usual case. Um and so yeah it's uh when we can see now that finally people are recognizing that there there is a serious issue.

I didn't even want to an academic job, but and by the time I was probably bad halfway through my P H, D, I saw what was happening. I remember yeah I would have very contentious discussions with other P. H. D students and post dogs and kind of early career researchers.

And I would tell them, like, I don't think that you know, if you color outside the lines, if you are an independent thinker, IT would be very difficult for you to get a sort of typical tenure track academic job now um not impossible, but just much harder than I would have been maybe ten, fifteen years ago. People still no, that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

Now four four plus years later, i'm seeing like some of those friends are having difficulty. Some of them have been hired in fire. Wow, it's been i've seen the whole the whole spectrum of of outcome. Some people have successful live taking jobs and just to keep their mouth shut. But for me, I just that wasn't what I thought academy was going to be like ah I thought I was going to be, you know, this little kind of contained a bubble you know that I guess some people call the ivery tower right where you can live that life of the mind and communicate interesting ideas and debate and disagree, but still sort of inter way towards s the truth that at least interview towards interesting ideas. But you know that's interestingly happening more on places like podcast and subsequent alternative to the paralo institutions.

Yeah it's fascinating to think uh, as well about, I guess, soft cancellation. I had Ricky shot on who coal the counselling of the american mind with greg loki enough and he was talking about all of the different ways that people kind of get soft cancelled. And it's it's just not being invited to the end of your party. Um you know it's people sitting in different locations to you. I think he wanted to maybe and I used SHE was hiding Jordan Peterson box under her bed you know like fucking and Frank in the attic I face off and Frank and SHE was saying that there's lots of sort of ideological shit tests SHE called them that was a really great name ah you know, what do you think about bench? Pero, you know, just like I can throw that hand grane into the room and see .

if anyone, anyone just remain silent and not say, oh, he so right wing, whatever right. If they just kind of keep their head down and don't say anything, you know, I sort, I observe that .

silence compliance. So whatever silence is violence.

And what .

about the you this interesting idea about the hidden hierarchies of the harvard d extension .

school thing? Ah yeah well, I saw that with I was no observing what was occurring on twitter slash x with Christopher rufo who was one of the sort of architecture of uh pointing out in removing the the harvard professor after her comments about kind of condoning anti cement sm campus and then discovering her plagiarism in all of this but now after he know he was perceived to be successful, I mean that he was asked that he was pressure to resign and he did all of these professors at elite universities and all of these this university supporting members of the chatter in class were saying, oh, Christopher roof, I got a degree from the harvard extension school and you know are people aware that that's not the real harvard and people do people understand that it's not typically what we think of as uh, a real graduate studies degree at master is not real masters degree from harvard.

Uh, they just want to people to be very aware that this, you know this this sort of outsider, this club who got this degree from this extended school, he's not a real academic. He's not a real serious thing. Yeah, he's written books. Yeah he works at a at a very prominent think tank and yes he is like very successful in the real world but he has degree for which is sort of getting things backwards right you want the degree um in order to signify that you're capable in the real world, but they have the all these guys capable in the real world. But now they're looking at the the degree as if it's it's somehow um it's fragile late and therefore this .

um no fies all of his native of .

his real value exactly they're placing his value on the the educational credential rather than on his effectiveness in in his life, in his career or so. You know, watching this and i'm thinking like that this is exactly, I mean, i'm i've seen this. You sense entering college, sense entering higher red, this strange status xiety, particularly among people who attend these kind of institutions. I mean, the people who were pointing this out about roof hos degree, where professors are graduates of whatever harvard or overland or stanford, what these these .

kinds of places, people that knew the language, yeah, they understood what next tension school was.

yes, exactly. And it's just amazing to me that harvard even has this programme in the first place because IT relies on that duplicitous game of um you know if you if you're what A A member of the unwashed masses and you go to the harvard extinction school website, IT actually says we are harvard. You will have the harvard degree. You can put IT to even say something like you will have the you'll able to put harvard on your resume. This is on the official website, wow, simultaneously communicating the coded message everyone else had harvard and everyone else in this sort of verified segment of society that .

we have to do that. We have to put that on the website.

It's why would like IT just IT strokes me that they're willing to take the reputational hit to degree mail. I mean, to me it's she's very like todi like it's almost like I have this maybe this judgemental attitude like this is like very kind of organ that you guys would even do this in the first place that you're playing this game and yeah, I thought I was very, very ugly the way that they they were pointing this out about roofs and IT also ended a backfire, I think, because they felt this side of this faction of cultural elites and these legacy institutions felt threatened. They felt like they had received an l and so they had to lash out and get back at him.

Well, it's the same as someone does something to you, a really cutting job and you like shit shoes, like it's just, it's the only thing that you like fracking, just grabbing at something. I remember once, this is kind so funny. This is a dude stood in the front door of a nightly b complaining about the fact that he couldn't get in, and he just kept on shopping and kept on shopping and kept shopping.

And I was feeling particularly busy that day or whatever. I said something back to him. And i've got like two or three six foot four joy gorillas.

I decided me that are working, and i'm busy trying to organized clipboard to something else. And he couldn't think of anything to do. So I had A A necklace on of some kind, like on the outside of A T shirt.

And he sort of reach forward and like, grab, grab that. And like, that was the one. And then sort of scuttle up. I don't thank you. I like my thirty five pounds like fashion that necklace isn't a big deal but just that's the one thing and it's kind of the same as Christopher roof was like W W W W extension school like it's you're not part of the real chattering classes .

yeah that is that yeah IT was a very like short side and and ultimately be I think I was damaging to that.

Oh, anyone else that got that degree always thinking about going to that places are, oh, they said that ultimately, when the robb meets the road, Chris rose, like just one of the fucking like peasants, the same as rest of us, right? So maybe I shouldn't think about how .

that's interest. So you are saying that that anyone who might want to apply for the harvard extension school will see that. And so the half were applicants.

You know the institution will ultimately be less profitable. I didn't even think about that time. I I was inking more on the reputation and of IT rather than the sort of economic this idea that um that people will observe. I mean, I thought that was an error for two reasons.

One was that I was most people like snob, right? So they see this and they just feel like iki about IT that there even pointings out the first place or that they think that there are some house superior um they don't like that attitude in the second was that a IT to me that kind of exposed the the holiness of the egalitarian, an dogma the supposed the galitch, an dogma of elida dema that oh, we're all for equity and no D E, I, whatever is that we're so accepting and tolerant and welcoming 啊。 But by the way, like crap titles, fragile lent and you're a fake, you know.

So I was texting a friend earlier about this. He's actually agree to harvard. I was like my impression of this was basically like the attitude utility universities is everyone is equal, but some people are less equal than others.

right? To spin on animal for a he said, how in the road to wagon peer georgia wells, explaining how upper class snobs, while theoretically pining for a classless society, clean like glue to the miserable fragments of social presty.

I love that. I love that line. I mean, the hope yeah the book is great or well, was so a student in his analysis of class but that was just, yeah I mean, this has been going on for, you know, one hundred years now.

And that was the first thing came to my when I was seeing this, that, you know, these these supposedly open minded, tolerant, welcoming people were suddenly pointing out that he got a degree from from the institution s right? Like it's your website. He got.

you ve got over the bar that everybody asks for, but you kind of landed in an award place on the crash. Man, yeah, no, yeah. You're so right.

It's this. And this is why, fundamentally, I think that people are so skeptical and critical of anyone who prostheses about the morality, or how ethical, how caring they are. Publicly, we should go. What are you coming up for? I don't believe that you actually think that. And sure enough, when the gloves are off and you see someone in a little bit of pressure on receiving a little bit of heat, where did they go? Well, all of the inclusive ity and degala and care for the beauty of academy overall, all of that out the window.

Yeah, yeah. When the pressure is on, right? When people feel threatened, when they feel in a sense of sort of emotional intensity, a lot of negative emotion, certainly the mask slips and you can .

see what the reload out of the prom, that just as, and you know, this is the concern that people had all along, is like, oh, that's what we thought you were like. We thought that you were high fluorine not actually caring. A dreamer drinking in longer hooded nose pentagram dancing like decades.

And sure enough, your mask is slip. So I mean, this, you got your brand new book out, which everyone can go by right now as you go by this very second. We haven't ever spoken about this because pretty much since i've known you at some point you've been working on your ma trouble.

No luxury beliefs. Yeah, that is a kind of a example of luxury belief. A, it's not patients. zero. How do you explain to my audience that hasn't yet heard you talk about a topic that you've repopularized how to explain luxury beliefs.

right? Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the aflutter well, often in footing costs on the lower classes and a core component of a largely belief is that the believer is often sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. Um and then we can get into specific examples but yeah I like this when that we've been sort of touching on this snowball ish attitude about higher ed and how yeah so on the one hand, I mean your when when people are pointing out that this school or that school is Better than the other, um you are sort of boosting your own status, right especially these people who are already graduates over teaching at these institutions.

They're bolstering their own status uh and then you know there by speaking in this way about the hierarchy is and you know which school is actually above which other school, they are sort of inflating costs on everyone else who would like to send the educational latter who would like to get a degree. Um but a lot of these people just don't interact much with people who uh are upwardly mobile, are trying to be up the mobile, who are trying to go to university, trying to get a degree um the vast majority and I I talk about a lot of the statistics in my book about this in the later chapters about how and more than eighty percent of iv league graduates have at least one parent who went to university. I mean that's the sort of a mercy in is from birthday ve never actually interacted with a person or had a fifteen minute conversation with someone who doesn't have a degree or on their way to getting a degree, uh, and it's just not on the radar.

And so in their world, you know everyone went to university or everyone should go or you know anyone who did doesn't go to the same category university that they went to. There's something wrong with them. And I noticed this a lot when I ride on campus, I mean, and it's very subbed. I mean, at first I was sort of, you know, to some degree I think I was duped because I fell for the, oh, everyone's equal, everyone's fine, everyone I know.

Also, the other thing about these these institutions now is that they don't they don't look the same, right? One of the the ideas about, or one of the components of the luxury belief idea is that luxury beliefs have to a large extent replace to luxury goods, which isn't to say that luxury goods don't still siggins fy, that is brand names and all of those things still matter. My claim is that luxury goods have become a noisy signal of status. You can tell right away necessarily anymore when you just go about your life in public who's rich and who's poor just by how they look um and so you know I build on these sort of sociological frameworks um in my writing in my book um work from thursday bab in at the turn of the twenty centre here with the theory bellisle class he wrote about how the upper class the area craters of his time uh they demonstrated their status through tuxedos and evening gowns and pocket watches and monarchs and uh expensive and intricate hobbies and uh attending law ish events.

Uh hiring servants, those kinds of things and then by the mid twenty eight century there was a sociologist name to peer board do who wrote book called distinction a social critique of the judgment of taste um and one of his insights in that book was that um rich people, affluent people, they'll convert their economic capital into cultural capital uh and so we'll spend money in order to demonstrate their class or exhibit their membership IT to this verified state of society. And so in his day, you know again in the twenty twenty centre and he was mostly commenting on french culture, but people can sort of understand what you know what he's getting out, where people would to spend money to learn about the subjects of wine or the intricate of art or A F falcon ary or or big or goal for these kinds of that. You have to have money. You can uh be the kind of person who works a manual job, or who the power you see the same thing .

in almost a the reverse in asian societies at the moment. When I went to thailand for the first time, all of the receptionists were wearing lighter makeup on their face. Thought to myself, why it's so silly? Because you, the face finishes on, whatever the joy line here and what you know, the blending between the face and the neck is difficult to do.

And I thought, why? And I asked someone, why the fuck they? They face making the face pillet. They said, all what? Because the indigent labor is the people that work out in the field of heavily tand.

So the higher class jobs are the ones they're inside, which means that the pale you want, the more status you is confirmed on, you buy your profession. But then I also realized a how stupid of me and how you is my optically western of me to do that, coming from newcastle on time, the jersey shore of the U. K, where girls turned the selves orange to signify I have all of this leasure time. I'm able to go away on holiday to exotic places and lay by the beach and get sun on me.

I like that. Yeah yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah yes. So if you if you live in like northern europe or somewhere cold where there isn't a lot of sun having a ton is the the signifier status. So I think yeah that's that's an important point here that IT IT does vary from culture to culture. I mean, I point no, I point this out the research and everything in my writing about how status itself, the specific examples of manifestations can be a femoral that can be they can vary by time in place and culture and generation and so on but the desire forced that is the desire to exhibit, to show other people how prestigious or how dominant or how um. Know how important you are that that remains.

And so my my claim is that luxe beliefs, I mean mostly confined to that sort of highly educated people who attended the universities, people who study there are people who are graduates of these places uh who tend to Operate uh legacy institutions, who run uh media and and and and academia and who generate knowledge. People who work in sort of culturally influential organizations and a lot of them hold these luxury beliefs. I think we saw this uh, in twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty one with the defund the police movement, I mean I only the term luxury beliefs in two thousand thousand and started uh to write about IT and do the research to sort of support this idea and point everything out that um uh sort of all of all of the the the the sociological concepts underground IT and then the like six months later people started talking about defending the police like, I don't even have to like, I felt like I didn't even have to like, you know, here's the reason. Bet you will just deep on the police like it's right there.

You don't even most whenever somebody brings up your work to me talks about luxury beliefs, the patient zero example is defined police, yeah.

because it's so intuitive.

Can you explain why that can captivate logi believes so structurally, functionally.

so well, yeah yeah so so yeah. The logical beliefs idea if you say def under the police, you are increasing your own status because I mean you look like a caring person, you look open minded and interesting in and uh and highly educated um and so and is also signifies that you are the kind of person who went to certain kinds of schools, you concern certain kinds of media, you look into certain kinds of podcast and so on um and so IT makes you look a certain way to your peers.

But once the support for defunding police becomes implemented into policy, once police stations and police departments, uh, have reduced funding, once you cultivate an attitude, so it's such as the policy, but you're also cut vate the culture in the attitude around laender cement that we don't need police, uh, you sort of give permission to people to be suspicious of police or to be derogatory towards police. Um as a result, we saw that a lot of a lot of police officers started retiring in large numbers. Uh, there are reports in in major us cities that are having difficulty with recruitment.

Because if you're a smart, capable Young person who wants to make a difference in your community, like why would you want that job? Uh, if you know that people are going to view you with suspicion or with some kind of that the gar sort malicious or evil cops, I me, they get paid, okay, but it's not like considering the the potential danger they face in their job. Part of the reason why people would want to do IT is because cops formally used to be seen as respectable and and an admirable, and people confer a lot of status on to think .

about the difference between when a policeman, currently in the sort of current death on the police here, there were policeman turns up at the scene versus a firefighter or an ambuLance, A E person, you know, the other two emergency services are seen, a hero, data heroes. And the police, like the a cab, a cab s got, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so who wants that job? And so gradually, and we saw this, uh, in the aftermath of the death on the police movement, that violent crime Spiked all across the U. S, especially major cities.

A homicide rates increased to levels not since ce the early nineteen nineties um and so when all of this was unfolding, I I try to find some third data to see like who's actually you know because I don't know anyone in my personal life who thinks that we should defend the police I mean, other than you know some some people came cambridge and other elite, but ordinary people who are outside of these institutions. I didn't know anyone who was supporting this movement. So I had a suspicion this was actually a legitimate luxury belief.

I look at survey data for IT um found one in you go in twenty twenty which found that the collect the data from a representative sample of americans and they broke down the data by income category and IT was the highest income americans who were the most supportive of defining the police and IT was the lowest income americans who were the only supportive and then later the different different findings were uh reported for major U S. cities. I mini apple is and detroit, uh one in new york city.

Uh they found that White democrats were far more supportive of defending the police than black and espana c democrats and so IT was like the the people who were supposedly uh so so kind and and so uh sympathetic towards uh the marginalize and the dispossess in the poor and so on. They were supporting something that actually those groups didn't even want. And I mean an increase number of them.

We're being vitiated ed as a result of IT. Um in my book I point out that uh if you compare the lowest income americans to americans who earn the media and income, there's what is there two to three times more likely to be victims of a violent uh, crimes there uh seven times more likely to be victims of a soul there. Twenty times more likely be victims of sexual assault like essentia ross, the board, the lower your income, the more likely you are to be a target of crime. Could do with the police yes exactly. You could yeah IT would be nice to have someone you could call if you're being burglar zed or or assaulted um and so yeah I was uh I was a complete uh uh sort of back firing and I haven't seen there hasn't really been any sort of accountability or any kind of acknowledgement of what happened in the aftermath .

of that movement. Yeah, it's wild. And then obviously the the big elephant in the room here is that the people who are supporting IT are the ones who are the most likely to live gated community in an area or neighborhood that has not called the police in a decade since the last time that someone from the community that they are probably talking about trying to protect accidentally wounded through the gated community.

So it's rules for the, but not for me. And let me explain to you, pour under class pleasant person, what is best for you from my vantage point out here in my very comfortable home. Yes, yes, yeah yes. So that's ah that's .

one of the components of the luxury belief is that the believer sheltered from the consequences of the belief. And we have the people who were supporting the deep on the police movement, uh largely called educated, living in safe communities, living in gated communities. There were reports um during the the political unrest in twenty twenty and all of the B L. Demonstrations and so on all of the riots that people in should like rich people in chicago were hiring private security to patrol their neighborhoods because you know the police were either distracted due to all of the social interesting crime that was occurring uh or because police were retiring so on and so they were hiring private security in these um bridge neighborhoods and then in new york city there were reports of people just filling to the hampton like, you know, if you have money and you have resources, you can just flee to your private little gated area and from home start tweet about death on the police and get all the wakes since plotted .

oh my god you're so caring I know the cops are so wrong like they are training these poor black people so badly .

and you I mean I think people who are um sort of fluent up middle class people, they have a mistake in view of what so of poverty looks like. The only exposure to IT is when they see um when when they see IT reported in the media, when it's a criminal whose committed some kind of uh transgressin and that surfaces up and then they learn about the criminals back story and they start to feel sympathetic and so on and so forth.

And there's not nearly as much time spent on the victims of that person's crime. And so in in often what happens is that in in at least the imagination of the state of society that, no, they conflate poverty with criminality. And the reason why someone commits crimes because they're poor without really digg into the data, the research and understanding that the vast majority of poor people never commit any crimes, the far more likely to be victims of crime than a perpetrator, and they don't really think about this.

And then through the sort of portrait of poverty, I think, in pop culture is kind of mistake. And to at least and more sort of recent media where you know very few T V shows is just not exciting to see some working class person making no minimum wage, going to wear clothing and clock out, going home to their family and living a Normal life. But it's more interesting to see, you know the struggling school teacher who decides to break bad and start cooking map and flashing out of the system and that's just a much more interesting story.

Uh, and so that is if there was this movie that came out, I think was last year, the year before Emily, the criminal with the army lauser, I don't have you side. IT was, I mean was like the perfect kind of movie for this, for this. You know, the luxury ably class is this Young woman who works in food catering.

And he has this dick ade, boss. And SHE has dream. I think SHE SHE is a college graduate. SHE has dreams of being an artist, but he has difficulty monitise ing her artwork.

So SHE caters food, but then he, like, he gets hooked in with this gang and like, learns how to shop live. You know, the whole thing is like, you will know, screw the system. You know, I can't make money off my art work and I have to work in food kary. And this is just ridiculous. It's so i'm gonna start stealing and and robbing people all and and the movie is portraying, this is like a perfectly reasonable course of action, right IT uh is like it's basically like breaking bad but the Young woman version out yeah yeah and uh yeah I just think it's that's that's part of what drives the larger place phenomenon yet.

wild man. And when you see that, you you really can't and see IT mary hinton had this about a lot of the advances that were proposed by the feminist movement in the fifties, sixties and seventies were um put forward by women for whom the impact wouldn't affect them.

So a perfect example is I guess, the push toward independence and uh, the delegation of shiver by men, because shiver in some ways can be patronizing, must be paton's zing to women like I can open the door for myself. I can Carry my Young bikes, right, like I can pull my own chao, I can pay for my own dinner. And in a world where women are trying to find and establish themselves so economically as independent agents, aside from the husband or partner that that supposed to need, I can understand why that would be the case.

But as he said, IT is a direct line from mention and open the door and don't need to to why you shouldn't hate your wife, right? Because the consensus, women are more fragile, vulnerable and need to be protected, and men should be the ones to do that protecting. And it's the women who are married to men who had a two parent household, who had a relatively good example of how to treat women when they were growing up, who have been through all of the institutions that have kind of softly embedded what shively is in any case, because that's just the way that a more sophisticated social life goes.

But that doesn't think about women who are in an under class or working class environment, who, in relationship with the guy who never knew his father, whose mom was cycling in and out of different boyfriends or partners or whatever in the house, who is may be abused physically or verbally or emotionally or whatever while they were growing up, all of whose friends are roughs that are going about anti social behavior, all of this stuff, and it's like, well, I know that for you, lady, the drives in my sidy spends, you might like the idea of being liberated from men holding the door open for you. But downstream from that, you've also liberated women from being protected from the underclass partner, from hit them when he gets annoying on a nighttime. Uh, I really I just thought that was such an interesting frame.

The same thing goes for uh support for um abortion rights, right? When you think about that is that I think that IT is skill toward the people in the upper class, believe that IT is a great idea to restrict abortion rights overall, to give less access. But you think, well, maybe if you were women, two hundred and thirteen of one particular village somewhere, whose six kids deep to three different men, maybe easy access to both control would be a good thing for them to have. Oh ah yeah, it's just it's so interesting how IT can be split by race, or IT can be split by class, or IT can be split .

within gender. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was. I mean, it's it's interesting because I think that a lot of the people who promote these views or who think that these are sort of progressive or fashionable or they don't think about how that would affect someone outside of their social status, or they mistakenly over extend the way that they think to everyone else, that, well, here's what would be good for me, or here's what would be good for my class, are my group and therefore would be good for everyone.

Or the only reason why other people aren't thinking like me, aren't pursuing the same kind of life as me as because they don't have the same uh or or because my preference is aren't implement mente in society or throughout culture. I mean that yeah would you said earlier about about mary harrington? Point is interesting.

I mean, I saw this first hand that where I grew up, basically anyone anyone like, you know, who was remotely sort of academically inclined, little one off to some state university, everyone who who wasn't but still had some sort of, uh, restlessness or ambition, they join the military and then all the guys who are left behind. I mean, there's there's you know not not much left for the women there to to pick from. And a lot of these guys did grow up without dads or without good sort of meal role models around.

And yeah I think that that what is happening often is like, you know women get pregnant. They have children with mutio men or the men and they have multiple partners and don't interact with their kids I mean, no, I have now have friends that I graduate from high school with you are these and yeah it's just IT looks very different right like that um the sort of liberation and the belief that no women don't need a man or mention, you know women can live the same kind of life as a man. And maybe it's true if you are affluent and you go off to college and you're going to be a Young professional, a career driven, but if you're just working a minimal job and you're me, most people aren't going going to derive a ton of satisfaction from the way that they make money.

This a story that you remember you telling me maybe about some lady friend that you'd spoken to about. SHE said we should be able to move beyond the nuclear a family because it's restrictive .

and constraining. Yeah, yeah. This was someone I graduated from you with. We were somehow got on the topic of family and future in this kind of thing. And he was basically telling me that, yep, marriages, this outdated patriotic institution, and we should, society should move beyond IT. We should evolve capacity.

And so I asked her, well, how did you grow up? What was your like family life situation when you were a child? And SHE said, you know, I was raised by my mom and my dad, and, you know, I did have that kind of a conventional family.

And then I asked her what SHE planned ed to do later in her. Know, know, because he was planning to, he was working at the technology firm, was going to go to law school. But after in her future and he has a family or if he wanted a family, what would you do and she's so, yeah, you know, I do want a family.

Someday i'll probably get married and have a husband essentially get married and like to party this outdated picture of institution and so I was thinking that, okay, you benefit from this uh age old, ancient sort of patriarchal, but now this institution you plan to Carry the benefits of that uh arrangement forward for your own children. But your official public position is no one should do this. It's outdated.

SHE was sort of degrading IT trying to downplay IT saying other people shouldn't do this and to missing very duplicity that know this clearly, marriage has positive benefits. I mean, that was something that I learned when I got to college was almost every single one of my classmates and peers came from two parent families. Whether right group IT was basically zero. And so clearly marriage had some you know some kind of effect here um and yet the place the the the the group that is the most likely to downplay the benefits of marriages are the most likely to be products of successful marriages under the most likely to form marriages themselves.

How come you're not more Better about your childhood?

Um I mean, I I used to be I used to actually be more angry when I was in my eighteenth early twenty years. Um I mean nothing party was just getting older um I think just age things just kind attend to like burn out in dmm over time anyway. Um and I think I know the other was just a lot of sort of self uh focused work uh self improvement um trying to you know get passed IT and put IT on the context and realize you know that that on the one hand people are responsible for what they do in their lives um but on the other I mean to understand the sort of to understand the geneology of the ideas that let us to this point that's been helpful to to understand that yes, like data day, we have agency over our lives but the sort of there are these decisions and and cultural trajectories and all of these other forces that are in place that that player role too and so you know, when I started to dig at the root of this, if you know who is responsible for some of these ideas, who promotes the luxury, belief and so on, and entering in institutions where I can see IT, you know, I can IT helps me to just understand IT. And I think that sort of settles my settle my anger bit too.

It's very interesting thinking about that. I had a sirup traveller on she's psychotherapy pushing back very hard against what he calls instagram therapy which is identifying everybody is a victim and we've got trauma and stuff and SHE said um remembering the experienced trauma isn't being a victim making your identity out of IT is yeah yeah I .

think that's well put. I mean, I didn't really I didn't really think of myself as a victim, and people didn't call me a victim. I thought in those terms until I got to college before that I was just day to day life. I mean, I was just, you know, trying to struggling to get dba e, trying to make money, trying to whatever, living paycheck to paycheck and then later during the military and you know just my my plate was for later um you know sort of towards the end of my enlistment before I entered college, I did um do istan in rehab and I talked to uh therapies and now I did sort of address a lot of the issues that I had experiences when I was a kid and that was helpful too.

I think to just sort of contextualize IT and also to um you just sort of be more open with the people I grew up with and close with, you know my sister and my mom and all these people to just in my daughter family to talk to them about all of this. I mean, that's helpful too. I think there is this um this tendency for Young people, Young men in particular, that you know self sufficiency, you will solve all your problems to just be completely self reliant.

You don't have to rely on anyone you know you your relationships are sort of peripheral um and I live that way for a while and I probably did help to sort of and that LED me to equip myself to be a self sufficient person. But later you know I did realize that actually relationships are important. I mean, I went through the first six years um after I left home, I never visited.

I never visited for the holidays. I never visited at her for any kind of special occasions. I mean I did visit like you know on and off whenever really whatever suit my schedule was very selfish. Um but then later, you know now I make an effort now I make an effort to do all those things and realize that actually, you know all of these things relationships are more important than than you think, especially when you're Young right there is there is value there um even if you think .

there is isn't yet is a degree of romanticism about monkey de and loan range ing IT. And I think my current theory on this is the monk mode is a great tool, but a bad master. Hm, because if you continue to pray at the alter of IT over a long enough amount of time, the reason that you're doing sum equivalent of monk mode, right, which is. A overreliance on self sufficiency, introspections in isolation so that you can focus on making yourself into a Better version of you because, quite rightly, there are a lot of distractions out there in the world. If you're trying to do a ton of self work or you're going to therapy, you're in rehab.

You're probably not going to a have the most flourishing social life if can be difficult for you to jugg all of these plates and if you do try juggle of the plates, going to restrict your progress in that area like committing yourself to one thing or a very narrow band of things, is more than it's not additive, its multiplicity, right? IT allows you to triple down, call drupal down all of your efforts into one very tight area. And I found myself to all the end of my twenties through my mono pause, that I, I really, really enjoyed monk mode.

But I saw, especially for someone that has introverted tendencies. And I get my energy, mostly from being on my own, a lot of the time, that IT started to become more ellery to me than being back out into the world. But the problem with that is the reason you're doing the monk mode thing, or the rehab thing, or whatever, is to form yourself into a functional member of society who can then go and reintegrate. That's the problem, that the progress can become addictive to the point where IT stops you from doing the thing you like. The thing that you are doing is sacrificing the thing that you are doing IT in order to get yes yeah.

yeah, yeah you sort of mistake the the means for the end the end goal. You're sort yeah ah it's um and make IT difficult to to keep that and I think a lot of people have difficulty with that special in your Young you like what what are your actions attempting to accomplish which you're overarching goal um in a robbery Green makes that distinction between tactician where the strategist dry the tactician is just what's directly in front of you.

What do you need to do next and the strategist is what what's all of this for like what are each of those steps trying to get you to and I think when you're Young, you just think so I want to make money and like money becomes the thing and it's like, what's the money for? Like you wanted do that money when you build up your bank account, what is that? The goal is just to have a big number, uh, on your a baLance or is IT to take care of your loved ones do to have the freedom to be able to interact with people that you care about and to provide and those kinds of things.

And I I think I I mean, I kind of came to that realization when I was in my mid twenty, but I wasn't until my later twenty years, really probably right. Not until I was about to start grad school. I was like twenty twenty eight. But I really have that realization that oh the reason why i'm working so hard and trying to get educated and successful and try to make money and all of these things is so that I could take care of my my current family, my doped or family but then also for if and when I have a family later, say when that um i'll be able to take care of them too in a way that I lacked when I was a kid um and that's what ultimately all of these things are for. It's not just whatever increase the the numbers on on my you know social media on my baLance or something like that.

So your background, the life you went through to where you went IT up efforts, yeah efforts, U. S. efforts.

G. I, bill, yale, cambridge, P. H. D. Book, you gonna an an, an amazing selling book, all the rest of stuff. What do you attribute that trajectory to given the your friends with so many of the people that you grew up with that are still there are the guy that that guy with three baby mammals and a bunch of ale mony or whatever, and they're in the same town, in the same whatever what was formative or what you attribute the change in you to that the other people didn't.

I mean, they're probably in there's a variety of factors. I think one is um you know you do need to have like A A certain amount of like innate drive ambition in the first place and that i'm not entirely sure you can you can drill that into people um so you have to have that sort of raw material in the first place. But one point that I tried to making the book is that things could have very easily gone a different direction.

Um I think having sort of attitude and driving ambition, those are necessary but not sufficient that there are a lot of guys I think you are sort of smart, talented and ambitious, but they're just surrounded by chaos and disorder and you know lack opportunity or or they've just been sort of beaten down by life so much that they don't even think to like spot the opportunities that around you um and capitalize on them. And so so that was there. So I think some of the raw material was probably there.

Um and then the other thing was just making this kind of halfway impulsive decision when I was seventeen to just in list and get out of my hometown. And I kind of knew that you know I at this point, you know I D had two jobs when I was in high school. I was a dish wash at a restaurant, and then I was a bad boy at a grocery store.

And I kind of looked around at my co workers who were little older than me. These are guides, you know, this kind of got in their early to mid twenties. No, maybe they like some of them, like they were like twenty four, but had a girlfriend in high school and they were just a kind of creepy, weird donor guy or the guy who you know would write a dirt back and you know just like smoke a lot of weed in the parking law and just no kind of em.

Listen to drift and I thought, like, I think now when you're seventeen or eighteen, that's kind of cool to live that life but when you're twenty four, twenty eight, like that kind of pathetic. And even when I was a teenager, I had thought that, yeah, sometimes my friends and I would ask these guys till I could get his beer, who gets up with weed or whatever. And some part of me, I was, I was like, happy they were doing IT on the other knows, like, like why are you doing this for us? Like what kind of loser is hang out the budget of high scholars.

I don't want to be like the weird old guy, the high school party when i'm at age um and so you know variety of factors like me to uh just in this right away I barely graduated high school. I mean now I was smart and that's the other point that I I tried to make in the book is that a lot of people want to blame the school system or that there's something wrong with teachers are we are not paying them enough. And so and maybe some of those things are true. But teachers aren't dumb like the most teachers get into that profession because they care about kids and they want them to do well. And they're usually pretty observing about like which kids are sort of curious and academically inclined and my teachers could see that in me but I just had no motivation or desire to do well in school.

I just wasn't there for me um and so my teachers were just a continually frustrated by me and so yeah I enlist, I get out there basic training, I get station and I spend some time overseas and sort of have that structure uh around me uh, a couple days ago I spoke with a mitral friend of us PLA pumpin o and SHE asked me this question of when I read your book and I read about what you were like when you were a teenager, when you were in high school then I mean now like IT just doesn't like there's a disconnect. I don't understand IT and I explained that I was in the airforce for eight years. I got a long time I was in from seventeen to twenty five and you know the book I kind of like gloss over because it's it's kind of mind numbing and boring, but it's like make your bed, you know like make sure uniform is perfect and like page and bookings exactly IT is kind of like that, especially for the first six months to a year when you're in trading, it's like you're not a you're not a person. You're just like a cog in this machine of just like, you know, would you like cleaning and and and and being particularly about every little aspect of your existence um and I hated IT I hated every second. But IT IT was important for me to go through that um to like learn the skills that I kind of lacked when I was growing up of just like here's how to be an adult, here's how to take care yourself, here's how to dress properly and but even basic things right?

What was the most surprising? I I think this be a nice framing actually as you move up through the kaos fear of different social strata. What were the most surprising realisations going from rob one point o to rob two point o which is, I guess, from teenager to being in the air for what the things like, oh my god, like that. An expectation or a social convention or that's a way of Operating or it's a belief or whatever.

I mean I think probably one of the bigger ones was um like learning the distinction between like self discipline motivation um because I I liked I really like to both when I was a teacher. Um I didn't feel motivated to do well but I also had I had no external discipline around to me really I mean, I had IT in sort of fits and starts in different periods. IT was just a very sort of chaotic rily life.

But I had no self discipline, certainly like I couldn't impose on myself. I just I didn't I didn't have the the tools to do that. But then in the military, I learned IT that you know at first I was imposed from on high that this is how you will do things.

And then he gets drilled into you and then you just learn on your own like, oh, this is how you get things done. Is motivation. Is that the distinction? The motivation is just a feeling.

It's like, do I want to do this or not? And if I don't want to do IT, I like the motivation and i'm just not going to do IT where self discipline is. I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel uh and so for some people, you may make sense in the context of like going to the gym.

That I don't feel like going to the gym today, but self discipline is IT doesn't ter how you feel like all you have a feeling who cares like what are your actions you're actually going to do now ignore those feelings and and do what you've set out to do and so IT was like that for my work for things like, I mean even showing up to work on time. Um I mean it's kind of sad but I was one of the Better workers uh, at my jobs in high school and even then I was like not on time half the time like I didn't matter. I didn't feel like IT and then the military was if you don't have to work on time, you get court martial than you go to military prison that's the life and once I learned like to to Operate by those standard in those regulations, these policies that IT dawn on me that actually, you know, joko has this phrase, discipline, freedom.

That once you sort of outsource all of your decisions to this sort of regimented system, then suddenly, like, life gets Better and you do have more freedom, you have the freedom to think about other things or to direct your attention to certain projects or goals or ideas, and you don't have to live your life in this constant state of chaos of, oh, I don't have any money now, you know like that, you just the the system so that your money goes here. And this is what you're going to do when you go to work at this time, and this is when you leave. And this is what and having that regimented system was really, uh, important for me. And now I just know I do IT at second nature to me, but I took eight years to get there. So yeah, I think those those kinds things.

discipline was the big one. What do people who didn't grow up in poverty not know about what it's like to grow up in poverty?

I mean, I think I think poverty.

poverty is.

It's an interesting .

question because .

I think a lot of people actually attempt to they attempt imagine IT. I I know a lot of people actually who didn't grow up poor, but who at least tried to imagine what I would have been like to be poor um and I think like the imagination probably isn't too far off from the reality that there are certain things that you want but maybe you can get or if you want but a toy or certain food or a certain thing that you know I think poverty now for at least in sort of developed first world countries, very few people are actually starving in the street.

But it's more like, you know, I I want to get you know maybe it's like a special occasion and I want to rent a video game at blockbuster, but that's six dollars and we're only going to let you rent a movie because it's three dollars like those kinds of like weird small things. You can only go on a special occasion for your birthday or something. It's not like a weekly, a current. Um the other thing is like the I think like the the social .

environment .

is something people don't think about as well, that what family life and communities look like in poor and working class areas now are much different than they used to look like. I mean, I like this statistics in my book about how in the sixty, sixty, ninety five percent of children in the U. S, regardless of social class, were raised by both of their birth parents.

And then by two thousand, five for the upper class, IT had dropped to eighty five percent. So there was a slight dip. But by and large that's the norm still whether for working class families in the U S. Working class children um IT draw from ninety five percent to thirty percent and I was two thousand and five. My guess is that dropped a little bit further than that now.

Um and so just to give a sort of a glimpse into this, I mean, there was I had five close friends growing up in high school and so there was me sort of raised in Foster homes and adopted but there were divorces and other kinds of drama uh, I had two friends raised by single moms, uh one friend raised by single dad. I had another friend who was raised by his grandma a because his dad was in prison in his small music to to drugs. And that's kind of like the Normal situation when you go to like a figure to a high school in one of these areas and just start asking people about their parents or their families will start describing about dads and prison or moms and drugs or you i'm staying with my aunt right now because my mom is in rehab or what.

It's just total yeah, it's just totally chaotic and disorderly. And this is that A A point that i've made in my writing is that no, childhood poverty is not. And again, this is in the context of the U.

S. And first world countries. That patch hood poverty is not really a very strong predict of harmful or detrimental outcomes later in life. Um the correlation is either very weak or not significant at all between growing up poor and growing up to uh commit crimes or self defeating behavior is harm, violence, um drug addiction, unemployment, all of these kinds of social pathologies there's a very sort of tenuous connection there but for childhood instability and those are undesirable outcomes, there's a strong and consistent uh correlation there uh and so childhood stability is measured by things like, uh, no were you raised by both report parents was their divorce. How many different adults moved in and out of your home, how frequently did you relocate um basically how much data day disorder was there in your life, how much uncertainty was there and that actually does seem to have a very strong effect on the on childhood development, on their expections, on their goals for themselves and and with. Interesting that when researchers control for childhood family income, the link remains remains strong rain significant between instability and outcomes.

And so one way to think about this is um no if if there's a rich family um but there's a lot of drama in chaos and divorce and addiction and domestic issues uh the child raised in that environment is much more likely to have detrimental tal outcomes, more likely to commit crimes or become addicted to substances or um uh or just yeah have have issues to children out of wedlock or multiple with multiple partners VS uh a child who is raised by two very low compared ts who are married who uh are very focused on creating a stable and secure life for their kids and you can kind of see this I think with like immigrant families and low income families that haven't really been quite a afflicted by a lot of the pathologies that have occurred in in the U S. Um and so I think that's important. Remember to is that yes, there's this poverty component, but there's also just this kind of sometimes I wonder if poverties even the right word for the way that I grew. I think squaller is probably more accurate term is like, yeah, there was a bit of that material in poverty but I was more just people like living in a very um kind of ugly and almost like massive stic way of just you know uh careless and a impulsive and sort of drug adult.

What's the mechanism that you think is causing that to happen? What is about so universal that this unstable, disorganized of bringing regardless of class or material wealth, seems to have such negative impacts predictably down? What do you think of the mechanism?

I mean, you know, probably some of IT, uh, would be in genetics.

but i'm not sold that it's a that quick to anger externalizing behavior as parents give the raw materials of externalizing behavior to kids right .

yeah and I think that I think that's one one piece .

of IT but I think that me exactly um and .

I think yes that would be the robot plummet answer um you know and but I I do think that that I can't explain one hundred percent of IT because you know if you if you just for example, if you just look at White americans over time, like all of the same things have occurred across social classes that actually you know fifty sixty years ago um I mean, i'll give you an example just for my adoptive family.

So um my adoptive family are basically White working class people um on my mothers side and so my grandparents, uh you know they were they grow up basically during the great depression and they got but they got married my my grandfather and my great they will tell me the story about how my grandfather asked my grandmother marry him and I think he was eighteen or nineteen and he was like seventeen and he know they were just like to the only two Young people in this town and you know and he was like, i'll marry you but you have to what is you have to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop gambling and he was like done and done. They got married and they had to sets exactly yeah that they had how many think they have four, five kids and um and they were uh married for sixty plus years, no issues and i'm sure they had issues. But like you know I mean and then they had four kids, all four kids divorced um and you know I just you know they they had marry they did get married but then they ended getting divorced you know some of them had kids, step kids, that kind of thing.

Now i'm a member of the next generation and i'm seeing my cousins and it's like if not even marriage, it's just like oh like they hooked up and had a kid but he hasn't spoken to his kid you know three years and know so that's what IT looks like now. And I don't think the genetics in this family lina's changed much. That was the social environment.

It's the incentives. It's the denigration of marriage is um and I don't know I know people will point economic factors, but my grandparents were very they were probably poor than definitely poor than my cousins now you know like they could not afford the things that my same age you know thirty year old cousins could afford. Um so IT wasn't an economic issue. I think a lot IT was just cultural.

Uh, what are your expectations? I think a lot of IT has to do with a lot of the stuff that you and I ve talked about you to speak about in your podcast around incentives around sex and romance in dating and just um the APP uh in the nineteen what is at the one thousand eight hundred fifties my in generation IT was like, you know if you want to to have sex you had to like of life exactly and that was that was just the reality then. And now it's completely different.

And I presented this thought experiment before. I think I posted this on back when I was so called twitter, which was if you traveled back to one thousand and forty five, got in a time machine and walked out and you know, the postwar era, and you said, you know, very soon, I think he was one thousand and six, and the birth control pill's invented, you say very soon, is going to be this magical technology, the birth control pill um so contra cept will be widely available. Abortion will be, you know to be more accessible that certainly than IT is now.

Um so you'll have you know the all of these reproductive options before you do you think in the future there will be more children born out of wedlock or fewer? Do you think that there will be more abortions or fewer? Do you think there will be more children raised in Foster homes or orphange living in chaos? Schooler, more or less.

And I think you know almost everyone that you speak to, one hundred and forty five present this survey. Um I think almost every one of them would say less, they would say fewer and then no, I but that's not the case. He was very much the opposite of that that I think even these technologies and and the culture and everything sort of went in a in a very different direction that I think people had predicted.

Mary, each start came on the show and adami, even the pale revisited, a new world parle book. Fantastic, just so great. And it's true.

And like you know, we look back and it's kind of cool in the red pill manufacture, even in the ap world, the social psychology world, for people to almost laugh, sneer at how rudimentary the thinking was in the one thousand nine and sixties, that introducing birth control would result in Better outcomes in terms of abortion, Better outcomes in terms of out out of wedlock. But who then would have been able to predict that, that was what was going to happen? You're talking like a forth order effect. right? Not okay.

So you gonna degree shotgun weddings because the owners is going to go from the mail that accidentally impregnated to the woman who quota and, quote, chose right? IT went from a man's mistake to a woman's option, and you go OK right then and then what's gonna en to that and what's going to happen to that? But if I got so far down the line, uh I was talking to scot galloway um uh you know he was talking about the predictive power of stuff in the past and he was saying he'd looked through come through some research about the great depression and had looked for anybody anyone predict this.

It's like the year before the great depression in the twenties, no one, nothing not not a kander insight. And yet in retrospect, you go, how could no one have seen this coming? Hindsight is a wonderful thing with regards to that question that i've got that I think kind of interesting is to squaller your wood, uh, up until the age of sixteen, seventeen, seventeen year until age of seventeen, that should set a pretty low hidden ic thresh hold right that are you're in a nice I condition room and your genes fit and done up housing and you're not worrying about whether or not you can pay for the uber to get from here to the airport. How have you found your ability to a hedonic ally adapt over time that can you recall that as an anchor for your quality of life? Or did IT almost seem like it's someone else that lived that that's .

h that's an interesting question. Um I guess it's it's a bit of both. I mean, it's it's a data day. I think I don't I don't really reflect in that way. You know you just sort of live your life.

But when I reflect back and when I think about IT and I realized, you know, there are those moments were like, wow, like I can do this thing that I couldn't have done. You know, even even after I was the, I think the pay structures part changed a bit. What I enlisted in two thousand seven, I was to think I was making, like twelve hundred dollars a month was the the pay. And so I could not afford a belt you know like IT was like small, smaller things like that like once I cover you because I moved yeah once I moved off base, I got this house with my friends but you know have to pay like first it's so funny. Now like IT doesn't matter to me because I I have money.

But back then I was like like like panic is like you have to pay the first market analysts rent up front and then it's like the security deposit and then it's this and then you have to and then like gas to come you back and in all of these kinds of things, calculating all of this and it's like, go, well, I guess I can't wear a built for a couple of weeks and come next paycheck. It's like, that IT sucks. And so, you know so their child like that like, oh, I could just buy this without thinking about IT.

That part is nice. Um I so I think IT is that kind of you like happiness researchers will do this. What is IT like ah they have terms for this is like life satisfaction versus um I think they may just call IT happiness where like happiness is like you're your actual effective state in the moment day to day.

How much positive versus an negative emotion are you experience subjectively throughout the day or the week or whatever? And then there's the life satisfaction and component, which is basically when you step back and view your life as a whole, how satisfied are you? And those two things are correlated.

but they are not quite the same in someone. Parent often report much lower levels of happiness with high levels of lives.

And and I think of that regard, it's like, you know my happy I don't know if it's actually changed much. Maybe there is a bit of that hedonic adaptation where fifteen years ago was like, well, you know I can go to wind is cool, I am happy or is now it's um you know something else but ultimately that hadn't changed. But the live satisfaction i'm sure is is much higher that like, oh, i've had a few accomplishments and I can afford things I don't have have to think about money as much anymore and so yeah I think there is that. And yeah also like reminiscing to like when I talked to my sister, some of my my old friends from high school and just sort thinking about those days, it's like I do feel a bit Better .

now but my life I I was talking to a friend and they're asking me stuff about my childhood and my memory is really patchy from my childhood is not fantastic, especially not sort of pretend.

And I said the luck like what what do you remember? Well, I remember a little bit because of my sister, because will prompt each other about how to remember that oh my god yeah we did do that thing and and we were in that can we got stuck in the model whatever right um yeah that's a degree where I wonder how much is just one good ChatGPT prompt away from um me you opening out into this really beautiful answer about some insight or whatever some experience I had as a kid but yeah George mac, my friend, once a month living bed before he wakes up for ten minutes and imagine or what I would be like to live with no arms or legs that's one of his favorite meditations among among a bunch of the weird ones. So he's trying to dial up contrast as much as possible.

Think about all of the chAllenges that would have to face. Think about what this day is going to entail. Think about all of the things that would be difficult for me.

Think about how great I would be. If only I could just, you know, wash my own back, if I only I could brush my own teeth, if only I could do these things. So what he's trying to do is is give himself gratitude for the things that he takes for granted that are very Normal.

Now the interesting thing with your example is that you don't need to imagine what I would be like to live in squalor because you did. But the way that are sense of self works, you know what is every seven years, every selling your body has turned over. So there isn't even, you're like two ship of D, C, A, three, three, three ship of tcs, away from the person that you were then.

And and even for me now being in Austin for two years, I went back home for Christmas and it's like, it's kind of like a favor dream. I'm being back in this place that I know so well, but i'm different, but i'm not. And then I find triggers environmental trigger, causing me to fall back into other different ways of thinking and stuff like that.

Um so interested in whether or not basically you have been able to lock in a degree of gratitude uh like relatives tic gratitude I suppose based on where you came from to where you are now. But it's a permanent a permanent battle like in some regards from a poverty perspective, like you were a guy who was born with no arms or legs. And then, gw, dom.

hm, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, those I think, yeah, that's that's right. Where I if I think about what I was like back then and I compared to now, of course, like things are much Better for me and yeah I mean, it's IT would be IT would be, I think, shameful to be anything other than completely grateful and you know, just full of gratitude for proud as well. I would like to think, yeah I mean, that's a weird one. Like the problem like you know I think when that's one of things in the book, I point is out like you know when you don't really grow with parents and you don't really I mean because I group in Foster homes before, I think like that credit, there's like the developmental window where if you don't really receive like positive feedback, like I think I just like I received elements in a very weird way where it's like very .

hard for me to accept IT. It's a skill. It's a real scale. Yeah, I gave someone a compliment, though I can't remember who I was. I gave somebody a compliment and i've never seen, and I wish I could remember, would probably be a good idea that I tell them out.

In any case, do IT is like the worst way that i've ever seen anyone take compliment? Just you say this thing that you think is a nice gift that you're giving somebody. And even giving compliments is a skill that i've had to learn because I doing something that's nice for somebody else is a nice thing to do.

Linda IT was fucking grindr. IT was on the episode that I did recently. K, and I was like, dude, I fucking a doyle writing I D substance.

You ve got two box coming out. I can't wait to read them and fight of every single time I speech on the post. I love IT like A A huge state we drop into for two hours and brilliant and just how people can go watch the episode. It's very charming like it's very charming because obviously he's e hold himself to a high standard and stuff like that yes but you see this guy go like.

yeah yeah it's very it's very charming. Um well, the other day I had this this interaction with one of my friends mothers oh you know, he was like very high energy and he was like, oh, you know, rob, I love your writing and now it's like, I love yourself. B stag and I watched you on the modern was do but like a so great and at first I was like, you know, oh, that's nice.

Thank you. You know, trying to like change the subject. I just like I feeling the all these complaints and I just feel uncomfortable like, that's really nice of you.

Thank you so much. And this is like, no, really. She's like, did you really get A P H D from cambridge?

Because that's amaze and then like, I started to walk away feeling like I feel pretty good about myself, actually. Like I was sudenly a really positive mom energy. And I was like, this is great, actually. But I took a second right at first. I was like, you know, just fell into that sort of default, like, very kind of you to say, thank you so much and then you kept going with, I don't know, like, wow.

this is a really nice you like the kind of the equivalent of of a really obey, sly, overweight person. You can't just go in the gym and do a little bit. Hey, we've got to shift two hundred and fifty pounds.

You need to stay on that trade show for another hour. Mr, then you, a crushing weight of compliments that you need. But I got something i'd lived. I've got who wrote a mister nice guy. Robert glover, thank you.

I've got doctor Robert glover coming on the show so I am very excited to speak to him and I D love to talk about the at the skill of both accepting and a giving compliments. I think that that's a really underrated skill. The the ability to give an earnest compliment and to graciously but honestly received IT right scale that no one really have to talk .

about that is interesting. Yeah I think from IT leave my impression is, is actually easier to deliver a compliment, way easier because you can be sincere about IT, like you can honestly show your appreciation if you enjoy something to tell someone but yeah i've i've yes seen this seems to be a common pattern that people have difficulty with with receiving them also with guys maybe um then then girls.

although even it's an interest, an interesting one, because with women for sure, they they hide ambition. They downway success and stuff like that. A certainly female to female communication. I think there is a more openness and more sockery that goes on with regards to that. If a guy thinks that you ve done something here that could do that was lame, whether IT might be couched in some other sort of language from a woman 啊 yeah that be interested。 I'd love someone to look at, uh, since I of us is incense Y A compliments from comparing men and women that .

be fascinating study. This morning I was um I was prepping a newsletter i've got tomorrow three findings .

everyone needs to go to robb, subside and subscribe. I outstanding. Thank you. And I I shamelessly report that at least one thing every like couple .

of weeks I think the deserves as possible. But this was an interesting when I will go out where so this was a study for one thousand nine hundred eighty eight. I i'd be curious to see like I don't I could not find anything more recent but essentially they broke down by gender um the domain of of of where people deliver the compliments.

And so for women, IT was a when women compliment women versus when men compliment men, what are they complimenting for women? IT was a mostly appearance. IT was like something like sixty percent of the compliments were about appearance.

And then I was like fifteen percent about possessions and ten percent about accomplishments and that kind of thing. Whereso was mostly appearance based for women when they're complimenting one another wherefor men. IT was mostly based on a accomplishments. Uh, most of their, uh, a compliments to one another were about accomplishments. And so one thing that I would wonder is like maybe it's um I wonder if it's kind of easier or or more difficult depending on so so I would imagine like for women when they receive compliments about their appearance because IT seems to be the most common domain that they would receive those quite easily because they're used to IT .

worse for accomplishments that makes them feel uncomfortable in someone if tell me about, tell me about I ve .

got my last news. Yes yeah yeah I would do if like we would feel more uncomfortable .

when it's something other than that. So fascinating and IT yet again, IT shows just how people, people's behavior, zero ozie on the most salient parts of each sexes, characteristics. So women are complimenting the most important thing to the opposite sex.

Men are complimenting the most important thing to the opposite sex. The same thing happens with delegation as well. You know, if this an argument between a guy and a woman on the internet, the woman's gna say is got small, big energy and the guy is gonna call A A slag, right? That's IT.

It's like i'm going to deregister custody. I'm going to interrogate your sexual process. I'm going to say that you're not as competent or is really hard, good looking or like successful as you think you are.

And i'm going to say that you're like faster old or uglier than you. why? Well, those are the most important things that you have with regards to social currency. And these are the same people who will throw these sorts of insults around like gretton bug accused and retail having small dick energy.

Like if I think it's that the third most like tweet of all time or something like that, I think SHE is I think she's in the top ten twice, and I think tate features in the top ten twice or three times and at least maybe one or two of those are his interactions with great attempt. So kind of, I don't know, like he's like the Michael jayson to her, Janet Jackson and something very, very successful. And they .

get together. Yes, I think the same people who would probably enorme like some form of gender blinks, slay galilaean ism or deny that there are any sort of biologically based sex differences will still sort of target .

is the same as the harvard extension school thing, right? Yeah.

yeah, yeah so yeah, that's yeah so yeah. You're, you know, a very progressive person, but then a man is annoying you online.

You'll mediately start telling him that he no virgin or exactly you throw that debate. Are speaking of that, uh, alex, under data, I just put the news study out. Did you see this one? He hasn't released the details, but he's capturing the data at the moment on IT through a google form.

So funny, yes but um videos up asking participants to rank the attractiveness of different red pill influences OK. So is the guys from fresh and fit who else is in the I know this like bunch of other people that are in that uh it's got the replies are so funny. I got to look so it's on it's on twitter like him mining for the datas on witter results yesterday. I I, I do I have to see on not i'm not, he's not. He went like more kind of IT like another big names with in that world or whatever.

But he is alex has .

an ability I don't think i've ever seen you get into a spat on twitter and I don't think you ever had to back in for despite having like hundreds of thousands of people that follow you, a wind likes to kind of he's more like a hit man so he'll sit up on a ridge snap and look out and then he'll like fire something. And it's like aos, it'll be like a single reply to a oc with five hundred likes from him.

Then nothing he won't tweet from of the week. He honestly, he pops, he pops up with the willingness, looks like just the fires and then leaves. But I mean, alex undergoes in with in sales in in cl co, uh that account that I think is the end of the self stock code he's back and forth would like anyone i'd like egg and non accounts like if he says and you've got this s is really well written, but his capacity, he's kind of like the destiny of dating research.

He's just got this predisposition that's very good for being able to put up for anyone that doesn't know who are talking about is being on the show Alexander date cycle. Think it's like alex date cycle on twitter. Just look whatever day this goes out on, look at who is are going tweet replies and have a look at how many people arguing with.

And I promise you, they'll just be mountains like tons and tons and tons and it's no one, it's nobody. And then sometimes it's to somebody. But yes, I think he's performing .

a much needed service because I don't have the patients for that. I think like no professors and researchers and pocket t like just people who have like a million things to do. And I think like but he he's he's doing IT very well and he's building an audience this way. And I think he's channeling his knowledge in his research for productive ends. And you know, I I think that I someone should be engaging with a lot of these like black pill.

You it's fuck in high Price. And do you see that we got lumped into a we got given a .

name to me.

you, William costello and alex on a date psych. And it's .

the academic.

and I think pretty yes, IT was a long time ago in this. Then I was like, maybe months ago, if I forgot to send to, but yet the academic, the academic manufacture type IT was used as a slurp. But I was like, if you want this to be a slurp, make IT less cool of a name. But in dov, I won't be out of the academic minus here. Yeah.

yeah. I I got lumped in if a couple of years ago with IT was some like eo, like so I was like trying to create like a league of the I dw. This was back when the I D W.

Was still I think I think IT was still a finger. IT was kind of on the way down. IT was like twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty one. Um and yeah I was like in the minor leagues IT was like, no, the heavy headers in .

sty thing maybe around about that that was before .

then even IT was like you I think you would I had just met and I was like, still kind of early days I was looking at this like, I don't want I like, yeah, I like some of the people who are where whatever I don't know. It's not really still thin anyway but I like but not .

really in I so talking about you moving into the real, you know upper stratosphere, a chop sphere of of class, moving through your time in the efforts. What about when you got to yield first non cambridge? What was some of the conventions that really sort of stood out? You because I think this is informed a lot of your ability to sit back and and look at these dynamics.

And o isn't not interesting because you have an anchor bias to be able to comparison to. You're like, god, I saw this thing and then I saw this and then I saw that. So i'm actually able to observe these DNA ics for what they are rather than kind of I get to see code rather than matrix is .

opposed to have have grown up inside the matter. Yeah, yeah. I am. I arrived on campus twenty fifteen, as you know, mature students and .

the asian. So looking like a Normal age.

I think I had a beard back. So I have like a full beard. This is like a very common thing with that because you have to shave everyday, inspect you to make sure it's like a Better be like this morning you shape not last night kind of thing.

And so as soon as I got on, like you know, not six months I didn't work out, do you? I think I gained like twenty pounds. Like the first semester was bad where I was like, I I don't have to work.

Yeah, I was really nice. And then like, I don't like with the mirror, like six months I was like I got to fix this, but the first six months was glorious. And so but yeah I I looked older.

I was older ah you know the students some of them would crack a joke about twenty one jump street you know like that of fig and. Yeah, was think the first couple of month or so, nothing really unusual. But then I saw this very strange, uh, I mentioned before, like witness the kind of birth of this new politically correct movement where a professor had written email essentially defending freedom of expression on campus.

IT became known as the yale hall ween halloween costume controversy, uh, on campus where this was october uh, the yet administration released this email basically telling the students to, you know, not engaging any cultural appropriation, don't wear costumes that would be offensive to these groups and then, uh, one of the faculty members on campus basically road in an email just to her students and her residential college saying, like, do we really need the administration interfering in our lives? Like you're all adults. I trust that if you wear things that maybe you don't other people don't like, you guys can just work IT out among st.

Yourselves, essentially depending freedom expression. And in response, hundreds of students marched around campus calling for her to be fired. And later, for her husband, Nicholas, Chris stock is to be fired, saying that SHE was racist. He was depending cultural preparation, these students climbed and feel safe on campus.

And they were using this kind of language, uh, which I think like now all of this stuff is kind of spilled out of the universities and we're all kind of familiar with all this victim hood stuff. But back then I was just plebe like, flux, ed, that, you know, was like, we're in danger. You know, there caused this pain, suffering, win der immense harm.

Uh, you know, this is like emblematic of broader systemic forces that are working against. And i'm looking at these students and like I know for a fact a lot of them were the sons and daughters of millionaires um I remember asking one, uh, Young female students basically like, can you explain like why is this offensive? I don't understand.

And SHE basically told me I was too privileged to understand why, you know, why every coker stas email was offensive flow. And you know, SHE was like some White girl who like went to a private boarding school at like group in a rich neighborhood did too. But he was an activist.

And whatever is so SHE was like kind of is the titania a grab like that architect uh except like you went to yale and everything and so um and I was like an interesting thing too was like on campus the whole identity politics idea was that if you are a member of these certain sociological categories then therefore you are conferred legitimacy to open on all of the social lies of the world and how to fix them and so on. But then the students also placed a great deal of importance on lived experience. And if you lived through something in your life, and therefore you're able to speak about certain things, your unauthorised, those matters. But those two things seem to be, to me, contradictory, that, you know, does that matter what you live through in your life? Or does does IT just matter like what you with category you belong to?

Isn't interesting that you had seventeen year scholar legitimacy when IT comes to live experience. But the number one thing which is ignored is class.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly. And IT was, I mean, is yeah the because there are so few people who had my kind of background campus and because so few students and graduates of these kinds of universities ever encounter IT just isn't on their radar.

They don't even think about I mean, what's really interesting as that yale is located in new heaven, which is a really low income kind of blue collar town, but you know they call the yale bubble where you know the students would only stick around in this very sort of, you know, closed area. But I lived off campus uh, in an apartment downtown and so I would walk through like a lot of poverty, a lot of squalor, a lot of addiction. And you know, having, you know, twenty minutes earlier heard some students talk about how they were impressed.

And then i'd see no real a poverty and real suffering. And I was just very difficult for me to sort of reconcile things. And eventually, at first I tried to be sympathetic and try to understand these, you know, these these grivet ces and the students that graduates in the faculty, all you know.

And then eventually I was like, these people have no, they just completely don't understand. They have no connection with whatsoever. And i'm some of that I think is legitimately malicious and duplicitous.

I would see, for example, people claim that investment banks were emblematic of capitalist depression and say that you, these are these horrible entities and in those same people would be at a recruitment session for goldin sex, like two weeks later. And I think, like, you know, that to be was like, that was a calculated move. Like, what if you like that don't want to work for them?

Yeah like if if they .

can basically eliminate the arrivals for these prestigious internships, then all the Better for that. But so I think some of IT was tactical calculated, but I think for a lot of people it's just um no the hearts are in the right place. They're not really thinking that much about IT. Um and so yeah this was uh he was very strange and then and the other thing is so this funny, I I I even know my father growing up and I didn't know who he was or anything about him um and IT was only recently I took a twenty three and me and got the results and found that my father uh was mexican and I went through I I called up our army ual friend receive can was like and you look at this with me and like help explain is like your dad was like this again.

You like indigenous from north amErica with some spanish ancestries like that's like a person use, like a group in L, A, B, what do you expect? And okay, so my dad was mexican, but so when I was at yale, before I had this information, I was hanging out in a dorm with some students. And he was a friend of mine who was a mexican guy and you know, he he was not like, you know, he wasn't an activist.

He wasn't like, woke or whatever. But I took a eureka off the wall and put in on my head he he is joking around, but he said something like, hey, you know, that's cultural appropriation. You can't wear several oh, my back and then once I got these results back, I was like, wait a minute.

me up on show, get me some for haters and then .

and then the next thing I had, the, but the next though I had was like, this is just shows how, like, how, but the whole thing is in the first place, right? Like someone from my background who didn't know my father, who could have been, like, I could have believed, like, if I had believed in the cultural appropriation thing, I could have thought into IT.

And now what am I supposed to think now that I have these DNA test results? And then he was just like the whole idea of like breaking people down into a like these ethnic categories, and they are or are not allowed to partaken this activity or that or the other um like when when there are people out there who actually don't know who their fathers are or don't know um they don't even know what cultural appropriation means. I just think like our our attention in our resources in our time I spent on such such rival as nonsense.

What is that? The tyranny? Small differences of that thing?

Um yeah the nurses m .

small ism of small differences that that the smaller the differences between people, the bigger they are blown up to be when you have this relatively a mogens group of people at yale, it's all today. What you can't speak to her like that so why like she's she's exactly the same as you just that one grandmother's half african american something yeah and .

and everyone is from like the top probably the top desi of income. I mean, yeah, there are more students from the top one percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom sixty percent like almost everybody is either. I end like, yeah, this is an interesting point in narcisse, a small differences where a lot of the anger I felt was IT was like between, like someone at the ninety eighth percent tile income who they were angry at that ninety ninety percent tile, right, like, you know, whatever.

Like someone from a family of whatever doctors and lawyers who are sort of upper middle class who are angry that the children of billionaire get to do something a little more expensive or a little bit more, they get to go to more expensive fiction, or, you know, like all of that was was very much confined with people who are extremely affluent, well to do. And then they were now a handful of people like me. I mean, I i'm really one who had like the kind of life that I had.

But I knew some people from more kind of blue color background, the class bonefish yeah exactly who are really just kind of like little middle ass blue color but not not like I mean, it's the thing is like the way that the system works is I think we might have talked about this last time about just how few people like only less than three percent of Foster kids graduate from anniversary. Less than three percent um and people who are from the bottom and come quintile, it's it's eleven percent. And so really there are more you're four times more likely to graduate from college if you're poor than if you live through the Foster system.

I mean, that's just how the order so asked against you. And so yes, I mean, even the people I knew who so you I think I was one of like eight veterans on campus. People think of the military is like kind like people who maybe didn't go to college or people who had maybe sort of a more hard life um which is maybe to some extent you compared to people who go to expensive colleagues.

But I was so I was one of eight military vets on campus but even when I would interact with the other vets uh and listed vets um in my cohorts so there are eight in my cohorts and I would I would speak with I was like, god, like basically all of them were raised by two parents and like you know had a mom and a dad who did prioritize education and who you know kind of a good examples and you know all of those things. And I think, yeah, we focus a lot on I think the left focus a lot of economics. I think certain strength of the right will focus on behavioral genetics.

But there is this sort of cultural component here too, that people don't really seem to to want to touch. At some point I will write write this this this post up about sort of the the limitations of sort of over extending the findings of of behavior genetics. I think like it's an important thing to know and to understand and sort of be fluent, but also to not discount the role of good habits, custom, sort of good behaviors.

I wrote this post, nobody y's a prisoner of their I Q. Yes, and I think that's an important a peace to that. It's true that the guys I grew up with, regardless of their parenting or whatever uh their economic conditions were, they probably weren't going to be um in a position to go to a very expensive you know selective university.

But I think if they had been really taught different um values and invoked different habits that you know two of them wouldn't have gone to prison. One of them were shot to death. Uh friends working sort of minimal low income jobs. I mean, that's the sort of typical outcome of people that community I don't think like maybe we can't necessarily raise the ceiling for some people. We can never raise the floor.

I think. yeah. And so the last one of the last subsides I did in this room was with destiny. And he prompted this idea that I named two step potential theory, which is a blending of individual agency with real world limitations. Your efforts have tons of control over your outcome within the range that your world's limitations will allow.

Behavioral genetics, teachers are that, on average, around fifty percent of everything that we are psychologically is inherited from our parents. Boo, fifty percent of our outcomes are limited by our genetics, yes. But that also means that fifty cent of them up to you, she's great.

This is another reason to not only compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today, but is also a reason to try lots of things until you find the intersection of something that you love and something that you good at. And yeah, it's like you can imagine that you have a bracket within which your potential sits. And that bracket is determined very heavily by outside forces, its genetic predisposition, its life circumstances, its nutrition, it's upbringing IT to the fucking unconscious trauma.

Ds, all the epi genetic ics at all of that, some. But your position within that window is almost exclusively on you. Now that window also determines your ability to deploy your efforts, right? But that just move the window. That doesn't move you within the window.

Yeah, yeah, James clear has this nice line in atomic habits about how certain people become so preoccupied with their genetic limitations that never tried to actually reach them. I love the yeah, it's it's incredible, right, that anything people understand this, at least in the context of like physical fitness, right it's like, well, never gonna like cornal shorts and gas.

I'm just not going to go to the gym which is like a completely misguided way to think about things um but yeah I like this like that that that line about sort of behavior genetics but then also there is individual agency involved in you do have some control over this I mean even I I just read this post about mucky valley and how um in the discourses on livy he writes about a how you know he basically has god doesn't to do everything he's like some of IT is up to you you this who he isn't a much more religious time than we are living in italy and catholic FLorence and god doesn't want to do everything but but then he says, you know basically fifty percent of your outcomes are due to fortune fifty percent of your outcomes are due to your own individual efforts. And fortune will favor you if you take action. These kinds of things there there is a political philosophy.

Harvey mansfield to actually suggested that this this transition uh indicates that mock veli may have been an atheist because at first he starts out saying god doesn't want to do everything and then he starts saying, fifty percent is fortune and fifty percent is you. Well, where does that leave for god? And mock ella may have been sort of suddenly indicating to the reader that, you know, you can talk about god, you can think about god, but ultimately it's gonna be luck.

and it's going to be you, and that's all centage wrong. And so one of the things I looked at your end of your review that you did, and that actually reminded me that I hadn't done mine, is in the breakdown of what was the ten. But I think you did the ten.

Most read three articles and paid articles. You should still be open your website. People can go check that out.

And that prompted me while I was back home in the U. K. That I haven't one one west so thank you for that. Um but the best read article that you had last year was one called how I read yeah and does this great screen shot from talib in there teeb says the opposite of reading is not not reading but reading something like the new yorker and that so what .

do you think he means .

by that um you know .

tell that is so that is a screen shot from twitter. I think there is no there is the sort of twitter to lab and then there's the the author to there's different you know there's different versions of him but I the way that I interpreted that you know the container ious tweet from until abb was that um you know if if reading is defined as you know consuming useful, important, timeless, less information, uh then you know reading you know the sort of hot takes and you know legacy media institutions often cover by bias covered by the ideologies of our time that you know that's actually the opposite of getting useful, you know important, timeless information.

You're getting sort of unuseful and important, uh timely, relevant may be in the moment in the tomorrow will people will forget all about IT. And so I think that's kind of what he meant here. Um I know to be fair, like I I I wrote no, that I do enjoy reading the new york sometimes but but not as much as I enjoy that tweet yeah.

yeah, yeah, yeah. What's your advice for people want to become Better readers?

Uh, I mean, it's a it's a habit. You know, I ve been sort of sort of touching on this on this, uh, idea of discipline, of habit of agency. And I think it's it's similar to a gym routine right where when you're starting out it's it's difficult. It's um you know sort of building IT into your schedule. But then once you get going um IT becomes much easier to just sort set IT and forget IT that from these hours from this time of day you know i'm going to the gym, here's the work out and here's the routine and now you don't have to think about IT anymore that sort of disciplines freedom idea um and so I did that with reading. I really been kind of on and off reader since I was a kid.

Um I taught myself how to read in the Foster homes and then reading became this kind of uh like the shooting experience for me that I could sort of you disconnect from the world and learn about information and yeah yeah exactly and so I would do that um and so I always been the sort of a companion for me. But with everyone gets busy, everyone has a million things that they have to do. They have worth, they have obligations.

But for reading yet, IT really does. You really have to treat them like a gymer's ine, or like a job, or something like an important habit. Set time aside every day. So this is what I was doing in in grad school, was first thing.

In the morning, I have my cup of coffee and I tried to read whatever five pages, ten pages, fifteen pages, whatever IT is um if people don't really have the reading habit at all, I do like James clear idea of like start from like the lowest unit of effort possible. White sentence yes. Sentence yeah yes would be really if you started ted from the word level but a sentence level or a paragraph level.

You know ideally you could get a page in um you know something um and then build your way from there uh whether it's a chapter, whether it's a book of someone. And I think you breaking IT down in that way is helpful because I speaks to some people who want to read and I go, i'm going to try to finish this book this week. I'm going to try to finish this book this month.

And I think like thinking of those terms isn't really helpful. I think you have to break IT down further of instead of a book a month, i'm going to read three pages a day or ten pages a day and then you'll finish the book when he gets finished. Um the other thing is if a book is uninteresting to you, it's not holding your attention to just let you go. You know it's fine. You don't have to really just because you bought IT or because you rented IT from the library would .

have you exit else says that it's good because you read on twitter that it's really informative. You want to tell the people that you've read that they've read IT as well.

Yeah, you don't think that the I was one of the things that I learned to was, you know a lot of people, a lot of the sort of chat in class people, they will not read the books that they clam to have read, but i'll read reviews.

And so if you wanted just like know about a book to participate in a conversation, just go with three or four reviews online uh, and that all sort of give you the highlights of what people are talking about or what the takeaway are that people care about from the book. But if you really want to do a deep dive, if you really want to understand a book, then yeah, you have to read the whole thing, cover to cover. But, you know, take IT slow. Do what you're comfortable with. If you want to skip around that, fine too, that if a particular chapter titles sticks out that you seems to be especially provocative or interesting, start with that chapter first, and then you can go back.

I would recommend for most books, especially most older books, to actually read the um the preface the you know authors know to the forward because for a lot of sort of older tax you are mentioned mocking valley early really IT IT does help that those you know the the pro logs in all those kinds things they will sort of contextualized the book and sort of explained to some degree why is this book important? Why do people care about IT? What's been the sort of commentary summary of of this author's influence throughout the centuries? And so I do recommend reading that are not just keeping the chapter one um and we have me there there other things to that um you can read multiple book size multi evensen.

There's no rule in place. I think we learn from school that. One book at a time you read this, hear the the formula for how you read um but actually you can do whatever you want, skip around, read two pages of this book, put IT down, you know take a week off for the other book for a while i'll on vacation, i'll start a new book even if i'm working on three other books back home.

I'll just pick up a new book off the shelf and go on vacation and that'll be my vacation book I do where things like that and for me and it's helpful um and and the other thing is it's helpful to take notes to um whether it's in the book itself. People get mad. Sometimes you book like my book exactly.

Yeah it's not like I vandalized. No there's there's a really good book um called how to read a book called modern adler by modern adler and um he's um he was a professor the universe of chicago uh in the mid middle twenty century. But he wrote this book basically like explaining the different forms of reading the different types of reading.

And this is where I picked up a lot of this information about IT OK to skip around what are your goals for reading um break down the habit but one of the point he's made is that no one miss he he makes this analogy so no one mistakes the uh what do they called in in, in, in the composers of music like the shit, the sheet music or something? No one confuses that for the Melody itself, right? It's like no one's you know it's not the paper is not sacred.

The ideas on them are sacred. And most authors would be flattered if someone was so invested in the book, in the topic that they are in cking. Yeah the margin like yeah I mean, if you see this with like you visit museums, you know cambridge, they have like Darwin's notes or his scrubbings of other people's tax.

You can see like he was reading and he was making notes and and he was doing this in a time where uh he was actually harder to get books in IT is now um so engaged with the book um try to understand what the points are in the book. Don't just I mean this is something that I used to do even though I was a reader, I didn't really I didn't really um try to understand what the book was about before I started IT. IT was like, here's an interesting title and I read the back of IT and I would be, oh, it's about X, Y, Z and I OK.

I'll just start reading IT and sort of fumble my way through rather than think about OK worth the author coming from. What point is he trying to make? Why is this book important? Try to take that sort of metal level perspective as well so that you can really understand where is coming comment, break down the points if you really want to um especially for more modern social science books.

One thing you can do is essentially just read the first in last chapter or the profit in the last chapter because, you know, that's just the wait that is the style of reading or style of writing now where, you know, publishers want you to just basically summarize the idea at the beginning of the end for busy people, for tired people. What's this book about? You know, like what are you going to talk about and then at the say, here's what I talk about and that all sort of give, you know maybe fifty percent funny higher.

That's so funny. What about a revisiting things? Because your recall seems to be quite impressive, which is something that people want. They want to reading something and they are not being able to recall. What you read is kind of in some ways like not having read IT at all.

Yeah well, I think taking notes highlighting and then what i'll do is like, you know how like a google doc or some kind of note taking APP or I like cut in pay stiffs like a kindle version or if it's the paper version sometimes just posted IT on twitter um and then that will be like the search function where I .

can find IT later um or I can um that would be that would be rough yeah um and so yeah so I think .

sharing IT in that way that's actually how my twitter started with me just sharing noted things I was reading that's like how the initial sort of growth occurred was you know I was I think I was an undergrad when I started IT in twenty seventeen um posting my notes online and my highlights and underlines and and so yeah I think like in pointing the interesting points, doing like a very brief summer even it's literally one sentence, preferably a paragraph.

If you finish a book, like what did you get from this book? What are two or three things that you remember right now having just finished read IT? Because if you if you have just finish reading a book the most important or interesting or provocative points will be at the top of your mind.

Just try to paraphrase. They don't even go back to the book and say, what? What did he actually say? Try, say, what did I remember? Type IT out. Try to use that, that forced recall. And that will help to um to to sort of get IT into a long term memory.

And then every once in a while, like if i'm flying on a plane or if i'm you know in waiting in line or something, usually i'll read a book, but sometimes I actually just revisit my notes and say, you know, what did that book say? What was that point and do with a control laf? If I just want to read about what mating psychology would have, you all just do that? The control lapt. And okay, here, my notes, I made psychology from David bus. This book at that book battle helped me as sort of connect the dodds and and and and also helped to provide material for my sub stack.

which is most important, obvious. Ly, rob, I appreciate the a lot of you for a good to speak you again. I'm so happy that this books finally are is taken forever.

has been five years plus yes.

yeah that this has been going and then it's been ready to be published for a goodwill as well. And you've been so I have held at the starting line so I wish people go to want to check out the book that substantially everything else.

yeah, they can get. My book troubled a memorial, Foster care, family, social class. That's wherever books are sold.

And if follow me on twitter at rocky henderson subset, rocky Anderson, doc M. I. Thanks for. Thank you, Chris.