Why Wealthy Kids are the Most Depressed
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
181.77948
Summary
In this episode, we re doing another research-heavy episode where we re talking about how the urban monoculture is ruining the lives of millions of people around the world, and why. We re joined by our guest, Dr. Simone Horschig, an epidemiologist and epidemiologist who has spent much of her life studying the effects of urbanization on mental health. She s been researching for years, and her research has focused on the link between urbanization and higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse among young people living in the suburbs.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
demographic of young people who had the highest rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse
00:00:05.500
were in families of over $120,000 of average income, which is upper middle income. In one
00:00:12.360
cohort, suburban affluent teens reported significantly higher use of cigarettes,
00:00:16.680
alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs than their inner city counterparts.
00:00:21.680
So the suburban teens are doing more hard drugs than the inner city teens.
00:00:28.320
Hello, Simone! Today we're doing another research-heavy episode because our audience loves these.
00:00:35.440
I love counterintuitive research, and I love on the urban monoculture and the tragedy it has created in this society.
00:00:45.340
Well, there's just something that there shouldn't fraud from specifically luxuriating in the misery of people
00:00:52.580
whose core value is not misery and who fails so badly at it while also dumping on us constantly is just amazing.
00:01:01.240
They sacrifice everything else, every other value that a human could have.
00:01:06.300
In the name of happiness, and then they're miserable.
00:01:09.000
Well, not happiness, but being able to seek after every biological instinct they have.
00:01:16.120
Anything that they think will make them happy, they go pursue it.
00:01:19.440
Anything that would make them happy to believe about themselves, they have to have it affirmed.
00:01:23.980
And they say we're monsters for not creating that cultural structure for our own children.
00:01:28.640
And they say, how dare you live the life you want to live?
00:01:31.180
And then we look at them, and they live a life of horror.
00:01:37.400
Even when they're successful, even when they achieve everything they want, it's still a life of existential horror.
00:01:44.980
And that makes me so – I would be so hard to live in a world where the people who are unjustly oppressing you are living great lives.
00:01:55.620
Like, I don't know if, like, God worked this out for us or whatever, but yeah.
00:02:01.520
So this is something I decided to dig into after I noticed in a study when we were, like, looking for other causes of fertility collapse, blah, blah, blah.
00:02:08.380
And I noticed in one study that it showed that the demographic of young people who had the highest rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse were in families of over $120,000 of average income, which is upper middle income.
00:02:22.540
Like, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a spoonie, which, in other words, is a, like, hypochondriac internet denizen, like the modern version of a hypochondriac.
00:02:31.780
They are pretty much upper middle class young women, again.
00:02:37.360
So, we're going to go over a few studies on this and then discuss hypotheses around what could be causing this, okay?
00:02:45.020
The first study here is called Children of the Affluent, Challenges to Well-Being, and this came out in 2005.
00:02:54.280
So affluent youth showed higher rates of substance use, anxiety, and depression when compared to their inner city counterparts and national norms.
00:03:03.180
By seventh grade, some affluent students exhibited clinically significant depressive symptoms and substance abuse behavior.
00:03:10.740
This was particularly pronounced in affluent girls, where these symptoms were twice as high as in normative samples.
00:03:17.240
So, literally 200% higher in the affluent cohort.
00:03:21.300
And, you know, of course, these are people with parents who assumed that because they had more money, their children would be better off.
00:03:30.740
And so many parents or would-be parents don't have money or put off having kids because they think, I need more money before I have kids.
00:03:39.140
Meanwhile, in one cohort, suburban affluent teens reported significantly higher use of cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs than their inner city counterparts.
00:03:50.100
So, the suburban teens are doing more hard drugs than the inner city teens.
00:03:56.720
I went to, on the island where I grew up, outside San Francisco, Alameda, there was the rich side high school and there was the less rich side high school.
00:04:06.420
And the joke was that we always, we sold the drugs.
00:04:10.160
Ensign Hill High School sold the drugs to Alameda High School.
00:04:19.800
Long story, I'd been basically kicked out of my family.
00:04:22.700
I hadn't lived with my family after the age of 13.
00:04:25.380
I lived off of an education trust when my ancestors set up at boarding school.
00:04:30.320
And at boarding school, so I wasn't like living there because I had everything.
00:04:35.900
I was living there because I had nowhere else to go.
00:04:37.900
And I didn't go home over the summers either, really.
00:04:40.060
So, it wasn't one of the best boarding schools.
00:04:48.480
Like, I remember that at one point I was going to be sleeping with like an Andover girl.
00:04:52.980
And like my roommate, in the same way when like you, so people who might not know, Andover is like the best.
00:05:01.700
In the same way that you had some of your friends when you were moving to Texas and they were like, watch out.
00:05:08.120
Like, you're going to get shot if you move to Texas.
00:05:13.740
And he was like, you know, make sure she doesn't offer you hard drugs.
00:05:20.320
You know, and this is somebody who even like did drugs.
00:05:26.360
Like heroin and cocaine and like, you know, she's like, you should probably get her tested if you're going to sleep with her.
00:05:33.540
You know, like, you're imagining them like sharing needles and stuff.
00:05:42.100
We're actually known for selling the drugs, but not really necessarily for doing them.
00:05:46.220
And that the kids from the wealthier high school who are known for buying them maybe had more problems in many ways.
00:05:51.640
And I feel like a lot of tropes and jokes, you know, they're funny because they are surprising, but they make sense.
00:05:59.440
I think that's part of this dynamic here of wealthier kids also kind of having the money and the leisure and the ennui necessary for drug use.
00:06:09.660
I always call it the, what was the woman from Great Gatsby's name?
00:06:16.260
And I dated some girls like this because my mom wanted me to marry an heiress, right?
00:06:20.360
And she's like, marry an heiress, marry an heiress, marry an heiress.
00:06:22.760
She goes, the easiest way to get rich is to marry rich.
00:06:25.100
It'll be the easiest money you've made in your entire life.
00:06:33.060
When they didn't come from, you know, my cultural group, but my cultural group is small.
00:06:37.740
What I'm saying here is my nieces and nephews grew up very wealthy.
00:06:47.180
But it is that they have not fallen to the urban monoculture.
00:06:50.620
And as such, you know, they still have a level of cultural expectation and hardship in their life
00:06:56.120
that keeps them very virile in a way that the, these other girls who I dated, who came
00:07:01.880
from these groups, it didn't have as much resistance.
00:07:07.680
Vitalistic, virile, whatever you want to call it.
00:07:09.480
I mean, they have a lot of like human life energy to them in a way that I just didn't
00:07:15.040
see in the young rich girls who I tried dating, which was always a problem for me.
00:07:21.380
And I actually think you point out something really clear.
00:07:23.380
If you talk about like hard drug use, when I think about like the scenes that I was aware
00:07:26.640
of as a teen, you really only saw it in the ultra affluent group and in the ultra poor
00:07:32.400
group who were like upper, lower class, lower, middle class, middle and middle class didn't
00:07:41.700
And I think it was because they had seen members of their family fall to like the lower class
00:07:47.460
And or they just didn't have the excess cash for it.
00:07:51.660
If you're going to get, if you're going to buy these things as a kid, you have cash and
00:07:57.320
And the thing is like, you know, the, the, the kids who worked to get their money didn't
00:08:02.980
have time necessarily to just sort of like blitz out and the, yeah, the kids who couldn't
00:08:13.080
even get jobs didn't have money to buy anything.
00:08:18.920
So bourbon girls were three times more likely to report clinically significant levels of
00:08:31.260
About 20% of affluent use showed persistently high substance use throughout high school,
00:08:36.880
along with depression and anxiety and academic problems.
00:08:39.880
And for this study, the first one we're looking at here, the reasons that were cited were academic
00:08:45.420
Children with high perfectionist strivings and those who felt their parents overemphasized
00:08:49.560
achievements showed higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance use.
00:08:58.900
But if you think that people from other demographic groups are not pushed hard, I was pushed extremely
00:09:09.040
It was more just like, well, we expect you to achieve this because that's who you are.
00:09:12.100
If you achieve any less and we'll never talk to you again.
00:09:14.280
And I had already been pushed out of the house.
00:09:17.820
When my family was like, make this work or you're gone.
00:09:22.400
They're like, remember how you haven't been allowed home since you were 13?
00:09:26.360
I'm like, oh yeah, I get that this threat is real.
00:09:30.460
Like the disowning thing is not a, and other people in another video, they've been like,
00:09:34.040
I've never heard of this like disowning tradition.
00:09:37.520
And it is a tradition that is implemented for people who see it as cruel.
00:09:40.960
It comes from families who have high clan-based structures where like family really matters.
00:09:45.280
Blood is stricter than water is something I heard.
00:09:50.460
It's how they prevent nepotism, i.e. the promotion of people who are otherwise incompetent.
00:09:55.320
And it's also how they prevent inter-clan warfare.
00:09:58.280
Well, the only way you can have meritocracy within a family clan is by getting rid of people.
00:10:09.080
And so, no, it's not that they were being pushed too hard.
00:10:11.620
It's just that that was the just-so story the kids came up with to explain their whininess.
00:10:15.980
And then, two, isolation from adults, both literal, being left alone, and emotional isolation from parents were linked to distress or substance abuse.
00:10:24.400
So, if they didn't show this statistically, and I'm pretty sure that-
00:10:28.300
I think there's something here, and I think a lot of it has to do with affluent parents being more likely to be really, like, concerned about safety and more controlling.
00:10:38.740
But in that way of, like, you can't go out, you can't, like, a lot of, I would say, I will say lower class, less resourced parents are like, you know, go out, what?
00:10:50.620
Whereas, more high-maintenance, middle-class parents are like, no, stay inside, like, study, work with your tutor.
00:10:58.600
And that is, you know, we complain, you know, people blame phones for kids' mental health not thriving.
00:11:06.160
But I think the bigger issue is that kids aren't allowed to go outside.
00:11:09.400
You know, we've actually seen this with our ultra-wealthy friend groups, so we hang out with, like, a lot of billionaire-class people, and we hang out with their infants and their toddlers, and they act very different from ours.
00:11:22.760
I don't know how much of this is what you're talking about, how much of this is genetic, but they are very timid compared to our kids.
00:11:31.220
And we do things with our kids that they would consider bordering on child abuse in terms of how much freedom.
00:11:39.920
Come on, the internet's very open about the way that they think.
00:11:42.780
But also, when I see any post, for example, by Ballerina Farms, where it just shows their kids out in the fields or something, there will be 15 comments on, this is child abuse, this is child endangerment, they could be kicked by a cow, they could fall into the water channel.
00:11:59.260
Like, you don't understand just how egregious the standards are among especially moderately affluent, middle-class parents and safety.
00:12:08.000
And so I do think that they are socially isolated, and they're socially isolated because of out-of-control standards around parenting and child safety, quote-unquote, for children.
00:12:20.160
That's a really interesting point, and I want to elevate part of it here, because it's something that I remember from my childhood that I haven't seen in other families.
00:12:27.740
And even you struggle with this a bit, is I remember on multiple occasions, somebody said something like this to my parents, because we were very free-range-y as kids.
00:12:39.880
Oh, yeah, and you guys were described as like the Addams family.
00:12:42.560
And you also had the stories of driving four-wheelers into ponds and almost dying, so I know that your parents were hands-off.
00:12:52.560
Oh, yeah, well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I drove four-wheelers.
00:12:56.020
I had major crashes, you know, stitches, everything like that.
00:13:01.280
In one instance, when I was around Octavian's age, so this would have happened when I was five.
00:13:13.460
We went over Groundos Nest, and then we were revving the four-wheeler engine on it.
00:13:21.500
So we had a three-story mansion in Highland Park, and it was covered in ivy.
00:13:28.220
And Highland Park, it's the Beverly Hills of Dallas.
00:13:34.920
I think it was the Cox's who owned it, and they were like lending it to us or something.
00:13:37.860
Anyway, I, at a five-year-old, and now as an adult, I realize like why our neighbors like seriously had problems with this.
00:13:45.160
I apparently used to like to climb the ivy on the outside of the house to the third floor.
00:13:52.740
Imagine if you go, you're driving through a wealthy neighborhood, and you're looking at one of the mansions, and on the outside, there's a little five-year-old clinging to ivy.
00:14:02.780
You know for a second that Titan would do that.
00:14:05.920
Your daughter climbs anything she could possibly think to climb.
00:14:10.520
She would climb curtains if we had them in our house.
00:14:13.880
I actually, now as an adult, when I understand how genuinely young I was and how genuinely like horrifying that was, I actually think that's pretty funny.
00:14:24.120
I was genuinely, but the point I mean here is my parents at various times throughout my childhood made it clear that death was an option for us.
00:14:33.840
What I mean by that as, is family said, at various points when they were criticizing my parents, if you let them do this, they might die.
00:14:45.300
And they said, well, they deserve it if they die.
00:14:49.740
And it was, it was, you can totally see my mom saying stuff like that, right?
00:14:58.540
And I have noticed that I have that mindset with our kids a little bit, you know, it's like, are they better off, right, being in this ultra protectionist mindset in terms of their adult outcomes or adding?
00:15:14.120
Because with everything you do, you're adding some probability of death.
00:15:16.700
You're always valuing a human life no matter what you do.
00:15:19.140
You know, when you decide to put up, you know, guard rails on a highway, you're trying to price, okay, how sturdy these need to be, because they could always be made sturdier, right?
00:15:32.280
At a certain point, you just need to be like the harm or the cost.
00:15:35.100
And I was raised to believe that that equation should be very much on the side of if a kid is not allowed to be put in a position where they could kill themselves,
00:15:47.220
then they are going to grow up without the skills they need to thrive.
00:15:55.900
And also, they're more likely to probably do dangerous stuff in the future.
00:16:01.620
I want to point out, though, for the audience, just actually how concerned you are with our children's safety to the point where literally you don't want to go on family vacations from this point onward in which everyone flies together
00:16:14.720
because you are too concerned about everyone possibly dying.
00:16:19.720
That's me concerned about everyone dying at once, to be clear.
00:16:25.720
I am concerned with their safety when it's a variable risk.
00:16:29.040
The plane flight doesn't gain them an experience that is critical to their adult experience.
00:16:33.940
And this is something where I look at something like these parents who are like, well, with the additional kids you have, you won't be able to take your other kids on vacations.
00:16:39.880
And it's like, is the vacation really going to augment their adult identity significantly?
00:16:45.720
Am I risking their life for something that doesn't have any real impact on their adult identity?
00:16:53.580
But when I think about other things, like taking them into the woods, right?
00:16:57.000
Like, do I feel if I never let my kids go and play in the woods by our house, supervised, of course, that I would be putting them at risk?
00:17:04.300
And people would be like, why are you scared of your kids supervised playing in the woods?
00:17:09.940
And they always start with, family goes on an innocent hike in the woods.
00:17:19.020
So this last weekend, I was playing with our kids in the woods.
00:17:21.920
Actually, we were playing by a creek and we were throwing things in the river and then seeing how far we could get up one side of the creek and how far was the other.
00:17:28.180
So I'm always more focused on the younger two than I am on the older one who's about to turn five.
00:17:36.340
And I had lost my phone that day somewhere when we were playing with the kids.
00:17:40.700
I think one of them might have yanked it and gone to play with it.
00:17:46.360
I got to post a video here in this video of just how mischievous Titan is.
00:17:56.500
Where we clearly established that something is not nice to do.
00:18:01.540
Let me do this in abundance and then do it again.
00:18:24.980
You pretended you were bringing some back to me?
00:18:34.060
I was going to get Titan because she'd fallen over in the creek.
00:18:37.480
And I go back and Octavian is gone and I am running up and down the creek.
00:18:43.380
The next day, the Wall Street Journal is coming to our house.
00:18:45.700
And one of the thoughts I have is, oh my God, are we going to be doing like a child search
00:18:50.520
with like the police and like everything like that?
00:18:52.940
Like I read in all the 4-on-1 stories while the Wall Street Journal is here with us about
00:18:59.520
But it turned out that he just decided he didn't want to be with us.
00:19:10.880
And he's like, I told daddy I was going to go home.
00:19:15.400
And yeah, little did I know you were out there panicking.
00:19:17.660
He's just inside eating apples while I'm having a panic attack.
00:19:25.420
And I do understand that there is risk in taking them to play in the creek, to play in the woods.
00:19:30.380
But let's bring this back, though, because what we're arguing is that this is a very unusual
00:19:35.460
sentiment among middle-class parents right now in developed nations.
00:19:39.800
And that is a problem for the well-being, the mental well-being of their children,
00:19:46.160
as is reflected by the general misery of wealthier children right now.
00:19:55.200
This was talking about new research shows that privileged teens may be more self-centered
00:20:00.900
And this showed that adolescents from homes where the average income was $120,000 or higher,
00:20:07.760
reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.
00:20:10.820
One in four students in recent generations showed elevated rates of narcissism compared
00:20:17.720
And again, can you blame them when all you're allowed to do is sit at home on your phone and
00:20:22.380
then watch the channels and Instagram accounts and TikTok accounts of people who are also very
00:20:33.160
Well, and here, this is from the American Psychological Association.
00:20:43.420
They also appear to have a really high lack of resilience where they have really big troubles
00:20:52.460
Now, of course, urban monoculture says this is due to high expectations.
00:20:59.480
In reality, it's due to we never martially punish our kids.
00:21:05.640
You know, oh, we now know from the research, i.e. the 2023 paper that did the meta study
00:21:11.460
and actually matched the data sets, that it turns out that martial punishment of kids,
00:21:16.920
corporal discipline, that it leads to actually higher outcomes when you don't say that any
00:21:26.400
So just so people understand, because we've talked about this before, but it's probably
00:21:31.160
A lot of papers came out in the 80s trying to argue that corporal discipline was bad.
00:21:34.600
But the way they did their sample sets is they did enormous sample sizes, so no one
00:21:40.600
But then they say any kid who wasn't corporally punished within the non-corporal punishment
00:21:43.520
category and any kid who was, was, was outmatching for families, which means that if you were
00:21:49.060
a family where one of your kids needed to be disciplined and the other ones didn't need
00:21:53.500
you had some boys and some girls, because often girls don't require this, they would have
00:21:57.140
put the boys in the corporal discipline category, the girls in the non-corporal discipline
00:22:00.480
category, and then say, well, you see, clearly, corporal discipline is causing more behavioral
00:22:08.580
And when you correct for this, you actually find it's useful.
00:22:10.860
And like anyone should have known this, hiding somebody from any negative stimuli as they
00:22:15.840
grow up is going to hypersensitize them to negative stimuli and going to lead to things
00:22:19.240
like trigger warnings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:22:25.340
Well, I mean, I think that plus sheltering people from general hardship is going to cause
00:22:31.440
I think we're also seeing this in things like grade inflation, where literally, even when
00:22:35.960
you've completely failed to excel in an area, you're not allowed to receive that negative
00:22:40.360
The removal of standardized testing or, or SAT testing in some areas just were like, we, we
00:22:47.800
And then the moment life happens to you and inevitably you fail at something, which is
00:22:55.280
the only way you're going to start getting good at something or start moving forward.
00:23:01.220
Like we say, success is built upon a mountain of failures.
00:23:05.300
So you're, you're dooming people when you don't teach them that failure is part of succeeding,
00:23:12.180
a core part of succeeding, and that it is both okay.
00:23:15.700
And a sign that you're pushing yourself enough to actually get somewhere.
00:23:19.760
And they don't let the kids really suffer or learn their own boundaries or anything like
00:23:24.120
You know, you've pointed this out with play behavior, where play behavior in children
00:23:29.520
And when you remove that, especially if you teach them that the core boundary center is
00:23:36.140
You teach them to always make appeals to authorities when their boundaries are breached, right?
00:23:40.740
So instead of pushing back themselves, they appeal to the Twitter mob.
00:23:50.800
Keep in mind, 37% of kids in America now have CVS called them.
00:23:54.980
Because people don't have, and I think a lot of this came downstream of when schools started
00:24:00.520
to go this pathway, where it was like, when a kid's being bad, tell a teacher, you know?
00:24:10.020
All violations of individual boundaries are fixed by appeals to authority, which of course
00:24:15.860
is one, not a mentally healthy way to do things, learn how to handle things yourself.
00:24:20.100
The quote from my mom that I mentioned in other episodes, I remember when a teacher was
00:24:24.460
praising me for having told on another student, and afterwards she pulls me aside, and she
00:24:31.320
We say this with our kids as well when they tell on their siblings.
00:24:35.460
Like, that's what you're, I was like, but you're being picked on.
00:24:38.900
And she's like, that's what your fists are for.
00:24:47.200
And it's the culture is that we're able to maintain this mindset that I think are going
00:24:50.340
to get through this particular period of fertility collapse.
00:24:53.300
Because the appeal to authority also allows you to offload responsibility to authority.
00:24:58.960
And I also now think, I'm just now going over all these stories from my childhood.
00:25:02.120
And I was like, wow, I really was given maybe even, maybe even I need to push myself to let
00:25:08.280
my kids do more because it might just be that I'm starting from a culture that was much more
00:25:14.580
And I remember one incident where I locked Miles in the bathroom for an entire day and nobody
00:25:31.800
It was four and five range or five and six range.
00:25:36.980
No, we're not doing that with our kids, but I get what you're saying.
00:25:43.640
They were just like, yeah, no, I mean the, like, you know, I've told you of the various
00:25:47.420
times when I've wandered off as a kid and then, you know, come back and like their police
00:25:51.440
search teams coming together for me and like, explain this story when you disappeared and
00:25:58.260
Once we were camping in Death Valley in California, which is a very, a very hot desert.
00:26:02.300
And I decided to just, you know, wander further from the campsite than my parents expected
00:26:08.140
and take, you know, normally they'd let me disappear for like an hour.
00:26:13.660
And then I came back and they, you know, were putting together a search party for me.
00:26:16.800
You know, when meanwhile, I'd just been going around meeting people at different
00:26:19.520
campsites and another time when I was babysitting an infant, I decided to take the infant for
00:26:25.020
a very long walk in a stroller during the babysitting session, because it's what made
00:26:30.940
And I come home and there is a search party being formed for me.
00:26:34.460
This was before the age of cell phones, of course, when no one could know where your kid
00:26:38.520
But yeah, I mean, I would sometimes take my liberties too far, but yeah, my parents, my parents
00:26:43.800
let me at the age of 13, spend a month working abroad or volunteering abroad at a hostel in
00:26:51.320
Mexico in a, in a mixed gender adult hostel, one bedroom, just like, you know, rows of beds.
00:26:58.820
When I was, God, I must've been 14 or 15 at the time I did hitchhikings through Central
00:27:03.900
As an adult, I now realize that was very dangerous.
00:27:10.240
We wouldn't, we wouldn't, I don't think I would let a 13 year old girl be in an adult
00:27:18.680
So yeah, I would say that there are some things that we were allowed to do.
00:27:22.960
Are we, are we just starting from a further point?
00:27:34.680
And if you do happen to have an iPhone, if you could leave us a five-star review on Apple
00:27:39.360
podcasts, it would mean a lot to us because no one has iPhones anymore, apparently.
00:27:46.420
Well, no, it's because our audience, sorry, I don't want to crap on iPhone you right before
00:27:53.380
iPhones are very pretty and they have great cameras.
00:27:55.860
And I think a lot of very competent people have iPhones.
00:28:05.060
Who should wander by but a Samaritan of all people?
00:28:13.100
That a Samaritan, all right, so have a good think about your attitudes, went and helped.
00:28:18.900
Because what I'm saying is that he was a good Samaritan.
00:28:23.100
That's good Samaritan, if you could imagine such a thing.
00:28:29.240
I know there's a lot of prejudice against Samaritans, which is terrible.
00:28:33.020
But I'm sure I speak for everyone in this room when I say that there are loads of really
00:28:41.200
So, look, look, so what I'm finding offensive is your unreflecting acceptance of this cliche
00:28:49.300
No, I'm saying that goodness comes in unexpected places.
00:28:52.520
Yeah, and I'm saying that the fact that you wouldn't expect goodness from a Samaritan
00:28:58.940
I didn't realize there were any old Samaritan sympathizers, you know, Sammy lovers.
00:29:05.220
I didn't realize it was such a PC environment here, and at the end of the day, it is only
00:29:14.660
A Samaritan tosser wouldn't do that for his own grandma.
00:29:20.420
So, people might be wondering, like, why are we talking about the urban monoculture?
00:29:25.200
We talk about the urban monoculture is this culture that is dominant in urban centers around
00:29:32.820
It attracts people with the promise of no pain, no suffering, just come to us and you
00:29:36.380
can do whatever you want, whenever you want, and be affirmed for believing whatever you
00:29:40.320
And, obviously, this has massive negative psychological consequences.
00:29:44.420
and it's it's it's sentinels it's preacher cast is the modern psycho psychology movement which
00:29:53.600
other episodes we talk about this you can go into our arguments i was trained in psychology i know
00:29:58.100
what i'm talking about everything they're doing now is stuff we were trained not to do in the
00:30:02.040
early 2000s because it could cause dependence um they are essentially creating dependency you go
00:30:07.800
to a psychologist today what you are getting is closer to what historically you would have got
00:30:11.960
in a scientology thetan reading than you would have gotten in a in a psychologist reading they are
00:30:18.840
trying to implant trauma yeah that said that's not all psychologists some are still okay but most
00:30:24.500
are are part of this that these this group this urban monoculture has penetrated wealthy culture
00:30:33.040
more than it's penetrated non-wealthy culture in the same way the scientologists go after the
00:30:40.300
celebrities first the urban monoculture went after the celebrities first if you look for it and i
00:30:46.980
would well and i would i think we need to argue and point out that one of the primary vectors for
00:30:52.600
indoctrination is universities and most you know most people who are making upper middle class incomes
00:31:01.560
have gone through the university system essentially having gone through cult indoctrination at this point
00:31:08.180
i'd agree with that but i'd argue it's also a portion of targeting as well so if you look at
00:31:15.180
like celebrities i saw a thing recently there's looking at just how many celebrity children are
00:31:19.660
trans and it's like really insane amount it's in come to think of it it is really weird i wondered if
00:31:26.720
it was just a selection thing because no no no they're they're they're convincing their kid because
00:31:32.460
they see it as a status symbol so they are because within the urban monoculture being trans especially
00:31:39.320
having trans children and being okay with it is a huge status symbol see these celebrities what they
00:31:46.000
used to try to do was in the urban monoculture they try to raise their status by adopting black
00:31:49.860
right everyone remembers that fad and then it turned out they were basically stealing children
00:31:55.880
from like non-consenting families in africa and everyone then was like you know it's actually
00:32:00.640
pretty racist what you're doing like honestly and so then oh no high and dry how can i value signal
00:32:06.920
with my children how can i show i'm the best in the besties well i can chop their genitals off that
00:32:13.260
works um so now they're all trying and if you're like no some of their kids are likely trans in
00:32:20.320
multiple families you'll have an instance where they'll have like three adopted kids and all of them
00:32:24.920
have come out of trans it's like or three biologically it's that just wouldn't happen
00:32:31.040
that's like impossible by the statistics you would unless it was a social contagion you would not get
00:32:38.620
three trans people into the same family okay people like you must see this right like you're not stupid
00:32:46.400
are you or are you stupid are you stupid and you can't see that it is surprising that all the celebrities
00:32:53.420
are doing this and that yes trans people might actually exist but that doesn't mean that people
00:32:58.600
aren't using a trans identity for nefarious purposes instead of signaling and that these kids aren't going
00:33:04.140
to suffer from this oh they don't suffer from this it's not a big deal oh yeah except trans people
00:33:10.940
have a 40 to 50 depending on the study you're looking at rate of unaliving themselves you are
00:33:18.380
taking that kid and you're saying here's a coin flip it you get to decide if you die so just for a
00:33:24.980
quick list of some celebrities with trans kids duane wade naomi watt share jamie lee curtis cynthia
00:33:30.540
nixon marilyn wyans charlie theron uh charlie theron's is a really horrific case she adopted two black
00:33:38.680
kids and immediately transitioned one of them uh at the age of three uh so you know obviously this was
00:33:46.100
not the kid's choice if you have raised kids you understand that at the age of three kids do not
00:33:51.880
understand the concept of gender fully uh one of our kids is five and i'd say that's when they
00:33:57.360
reliably seem to understand gender as a concept but pre four no it would be really rare for a kid to
00:34:04.760
understand fully the concept of gender or regularly get people's pronouns right
00:34:08.540
next we have also god that she adopted these kids and and going for double signaling points
00:34:14.760
that's so gross uh we have heather dubrow here we have annette binning we have cara payton we have
00:34:21.520
jennifer lopez we have cindy barshop we have bussy phillips i've got another long list here but you guys
00:34:28.620
don't really care i will say that one to be the the one where it's the three kids together that is
00:34:35.360
megan fox however she just dresses all her boys as girls but she doesn't she still calls them by
00:34:41.440
male pronouns and i don't know i mean clearly she's doing it for the points it would be very rare for
00:34:47.460
three boys to happen to all just coincidentally prefer dressing as women so i don't know i don't
00:34:53.800
know what's going on there but yikes when you consider that unaliving oneself rate when you acculturate a
00:34:59.520
person into this sorry it's not it's none the cool it's not that cool not that cool not that cool
00:35:06.640
but what about you simone what do you think of this urban monoculture of anxiety and depression we've
00:35:11.620
talked about all the time the stat i love at cdc just a few years ago one in four girls created a plan
00:35:17.920
to unalive themselves on any given year over one in ten kids in high school is attempting unaliving
00:35:24.880
themselves every year i would love to see more research on how specifically children subject to
00:35:33.560
we'll say real trauma are doing mentally so remember there was that one i think they were
00:35:38.140
looking at kids in norway or sweden or something like that maybe the netherlands who had either
00:35:43.680
reported having childhood trauma versus reported having no childhood trauma and then how they were
00:35:48.980
mentally doing and then they looked at whether or not there were court records implying they had
00:35:53.800
real trauma and it turned out that the correlation in terms of like being a mentally healthy person
00:35:58.480
today didn't have to do with real trauma it had to do with perceived trauma and what i'd love to look at
00:36:04.660
is do children who suffer from constrained resources in the united states who suffer from hardship who
00:36:12.580
have reported like actual problems in their lives do they have better rates when we're looking at
00:36:21.680
suicidality when we're looking at drug use when we're looking at substance abuse in general or
00:36:26.620
depression than those who come from affluent non-traumatic technically speaking backgrounds
00:36:34.800
because i i'm very curious to see i was so intrigued by the mindset and the baby boom following world war
00:36:42.660
two where all these people had these incredibly traumatic experiences a very difficult time tons of
00:36:48.300
deprivation i mean first you had the depression then you had a world war and then people come home
00:36:53.560
and it is a 50s and everyone is having babies and everyone's building companies and everyone's
00:36:58.360
buying everything you know they're just like wow you know everything exploded and there was a very
00:37:04.280
optimistic time culturally as well i'm wondering i mean yes and no i guess but like what i want to know is
00:37:11.680
what's going on among those who actually have it hard so if we know that those who have it
00:37:17.340
quote unquote good from a resource perspective are doing really poorly are what's going on with those
00:37:25.920
who aren't doing so well resource wise are they better off yeah but i mean yes that's objectively what
00:37:33.180
the studies are showing but the point i wanted to make here okay and i think that this is interesting
00:37:38.900
i think that one reason there is the urban monoculture hasn't pierced their culture as
00:37:42.840
much everything here is a lot of this is around girls okay yeah and i think this is a unique
00:37:48.360
psychological phenomenon that occurs within young women that needs to be better studied and understood
00:37:55.180
if only real researchers still existed but the phenomenon i think works like this when men go
00:38:02.740
through puberty they desire to have it overtakes them it's like somebody got you addicted with drugs
00:38:09.780
without your permission obviously it differs depending on your culture and genetics and everything like
00:38:14.780
that but you know it's the way it felt for me now women very different okay they don't have this desire
00:38:22.380
for sex in the same way they have more a desire for affirmation and to be cared for
00:38:30.900
and to be protected right but the problem is would you agree with that or would you say that i'm yeah
00:38:37.420
yeah yeah to be to be treasured and dressed over and sought after yeah well fortunately you know we live
00:38:46.200
in a society today where historically this fussed over protected mindset in part came because women lived in
00:38:55.940
real positions of one personal danger and sort of subservience to men and they were often in
00:39:02.520
environments where people were able to in a way offer them a form of real protection offer them a form
00:39:10.660
of real comfort you know like a blanket right yeah today they don't have those things and they're they're in
00:39:18.360
this ultra individualist mindset because of our existing culture and because of that especially the ones
00:39:24.760
that have no real problems in their lives i think that women with a little bit of uh non-hardship men
00:39:32.740
do okay but when you get a little bit of hardship women's brains go haywire look at the effect on a
00:39:37.460
man and a woman's mind into the mind of a man see how many and tidily stored now see the same thing on a
00:39:45.280
woman at first we see a similar result but now look still at a reasonably low level her brain suddenly
00:39:52.140
overload she becomes frantically and absurdly deranged look at these venomous habitants
00:39:57.380
they went to university hard to believe they're all under 25 especially this young youth women
00:40:07.240
because they begin to look for instinctually what's my hardship and who's gonna leave it
00:40:14.800
and if they don't have a hardship they invent a hardship yeah the thing about it maybe i have
00:40:21.580
gender dysphoria or maybe i have an autoimmune disorder and they become spoonies and you know
00:40:26.640
maybe maybe maybe my parents are too harsh on me or maybe society pushes me or maybe it's the
00:40:32.620
patriarchy or maybe and when you invent a hardship the problem with invented hardships is they don't have
00:40:39.540
solutions no one can protect you for a hardship that's only in your own brain well and certainly
00:40:45.580
that's self self-imposed and what's even worse is that now the present therapy culture seems to only
00:40:53.160
really average of course there are still great therapists out there i'm sure but create codependence
00:40:58.820
with a therapist and sort of cause you to dig into this trend of income that's an annuity a girl who you
00:41:06.220
can build dependence on you you bring a young girl there you fix her you're like hey honestly these
00:41:11.680
things don't really matter no no you don't want to tell them you want to tell them oh you're traumatized
00:41:16.500
and your parents did it honestly so if they try to keep you from seeing me they're abusive and you know
00:41:22.200
it's a good strategy it's a good strategy for a reliable source of income it's all evolved it's all
00:41:27.580
rational actors but it messes up these young girls mind because they have never been in an environment
00:41:33.380
like this from an evolutionary perspective and so they create simulated hardship for themselves
00:41:39.260
that is worse than the real hardship they would have experienced historically and i see this so
00:41:44.860
much you know when i talk to queen anne for example like people just don't understand how hard people
00:41:51.320
had it until fairly recently who's queen queen of england queen anne oh oh oh oh 12 no i think it was
00:41:59.400
16 16 16 miscarriages yeah all miscarriages one was a kid who died when he was in his early teens
00:42:06.260
like 12 or something like that she had the best health care anyone in her world could have
00:42:13.460
she had the best support network the best living accommodations the best and yet her wife was
00:42:21.980
is demonstrably more traumatizing than the life of almost any human living in the early miserable
00:42:31.020
yeah yeah i'm like maybe that's the bottom five percent of the u.s population but with our social
00:42:37.480
services in this country not really and so this is the thing like we under appreciate just how bad
00:42:45.460
people had it historically speaking oh my god one of the ones i remember i think it was one of the
00:42:50.600
king louis that was one of the king louis he had an anal infection louis the 14th anal fissures
00:42:57.620
anal fissures where it was so bad and it was constantly infected because you know they couldn't
00:43:02.780
do anything about it back then that his feces came out through a different hole in his butt that
00:43:07.540
had rotted through higher in his sphincter i didn't know that that doesn't sound right
00:43:11.900
yeah yeah it was a separate hole had rotted through is my understanding due to necrosis
00:43:17.140
near yeah near and for louis the 14th yeah it had gotten really really really really really really
00:43:22.260
bad really he lived a life despite being the most privileged person of his time of constant pain
00:43:29.160
that almost well kenny hammer the eighth in his later years as well was an intense pain
00:43:35.080
yeah gout right no the the injuries he sustained from hunting like there was oh yeah yeah yeah
00:43:40.660
it got infected it was just yeah just terrible yeah yeah yeah yeah they stank yeah oh oh and i
00:43:48.220
remember working at the swissonian i worked with skulls of like pre-eliminated ancestors and one of the
00:43:52.260
skulls was like covered in little pot marks and it was because a fungus had eaten the person's face
00:43:58.380
away to their skull and was starting to eat away the skull and they lived like this for decades
00:44:03.140
the level of pain people experienced on a historic basis their quality of life and yet they
00:44:10.540
were able to intergenerationally sacrifice themselves to create a better world for you
00:44:16.740
yeah for these young girls who for their simulated fantasies have created these depressions and
00:44:24.200
hardships it's well they don't they're not doing it obviously they're not trying to be ungrateful
00:44:30.620
obviously that there's just no no no we haven't evolved to live in a world with this level of
00:44:36.940
affluence with this level of not needing to strive and try to survive that's that's it we're not meant
00:44:43.760
for this and so we need to build cultures and lifestyles that don't put us in these very dangerous
00:44:50.200
situations i uh you know i feel like these these people these days they're they're the urban monoculture
00:44:57.900
it's not as tempting to our kids if it wasn't our generation i'll tell you that um well we're
00:45:03.440
seeing that with gen alpha for sure they see they're like this is not working yeah it turns out
00:45:10.140
doing whatever would give you pleasure whenever you want to so long as it doesn't interfere with
00:45:14.720
anyone else's pleasure and then affirming whatever you want to believe about yourself does not create
00:45:20.100
positive mental health outcomes avoiding all negative stimuli through trigger warnings through a lack of
00:45:25.220
corporal punishments through a lack of that causes people to be ultra sensitive to any minor negative
00:45:31.940
stimuli and then create feedback loops oh this should have been obvious yeah it should have been obvious
00:45:39.200
you idiots um sorry i realized this for a long time like even when i was studying psychology in college
00:45:45.760
which was my you know i studied neuroscience predominantly but you have to study a lot of
00:45:49.780
psychology than no neuroscience um the direction of all of this was beginning to become obvious i
00:45:57.060
remember i kept seeing things in society i kept seeing things that people psychologists were telling
00:46:01.740
them and was like but you shouldn't be doing that right like you know you shouldn't be doing that
00:46:10.760
this it came over the edge actually at stanford business school i went to this class called touchy
00:46:16.760
feely and it was a cult there is a class at stanford business school that is an active cult and it's still
00:46:22.800
running isn't it yeah uh i i went into it and i as somebody who both studied neuroscience psychology knew what
00:46:29.420
you weren't supposed to do in psychology but also was really interested in studying cult tactics i was like
00:46:34.580
oh sleep deprivation humiliation forcing people to rank each other forcing people to look into each other's eyes
00:46:42.420
long interrupted uninterrupted periods where you're kind of forced to interact uninterrupted periods where
00:46:47.840
you're forced to give like self monologues searching for individual trauma this is like not like maybe it's
00:46:55.240
a cult it is like to the letter a cult and one of my favorite things that i tell this to people
00:47:00.960
yeah but you've got to remember people who went through touchy feely make up a lot of the board of the
00:47:06.940
stanford business school and i know very few people who went through it who don't one donate to the
00:47:12.340
school because of their experiences in it and two say it was one of the most important experiences of
00:47:16.520
their lives in terms of shaping who they are today and i was like hmm not exactly convincing me it's not
00:47:24.300
a cult here buddy yeah but but but these are smart people and i was like yeah but it turns out that
00:47:30.000
cults actually disproportionately work on smart people i know this having when i was younger having studied
00:47:35.920
brainwashing techniques hadn't been very very interested in i wasn't as moral as i was am i am
00:47:41.220
now when i was younger i didn't understand as part of the urban monoculture i was like if it feels good
00:47:44.380
it's good right okay right brainwashing techniques don't really work very well with stupid people
00:47:49.000
because they can't hold the memetic architecture because what a brainwashing technique really i think
00:47:53.180
that if you see this where you really see this is with carl pilkington where he just doesn't fall for so
00:47:58.800
many pieces that are even part of the urban monoculture and one of the reasons why he's so fun to watch
00:48:04.560
why his commentary is so great is that he sees through even sort of the cultish tactics of
00:48:09.340
modern society and is like wait why would we want to do this why this is this is really dumb i'm not
00:48:15.220
into this i don't want to be here one of my favorite favorites of his was some guy in africa who was
00:48:21.960
super rich was trying to show off how great he was to carl pilkington helicopter guy helicopter to show
00:48:29.380
him the city and the estate and then they land and carl pilkington goes couldn't we have just looked
00:48:36.060
at like a gps or a picture like why didn't we do that and the guy was so distraught and downtrodden
00:48:44.040
that he just couldn't impress this guy it's true carl pilkington didn't want anything more than what he
00:48:49.740
has he's like and to your point all the weird mental gymnastics that take place with cult indoctrination
00:48:56.460
and societal indoctrination just don't work on him because he's he's just he thinks too simply
00:49:01.720
he's he's of another another ilk a godlike ilk i love him so much oh my god he's great he's great
00:49:08.040
yeah he's clearly just not affected by social pressure in the same way that other people are
00:49:13.980
and it leads him to say things that sound insane to other people oh we can end the show with our
00:49:19.140
little buddy oh yeah can you get the kids i can interview octavian davian do you like playing in the
00:49:24.980
woods yes what did you learn about playing in the woods this weekend oh daddy did you is it okay
00:49:32.540
to run away from daddy in the woods yes but then i was telling daddy that i will not do that again
00:49:41.240
i promise i won't go with um uh the forest again and then you just got me a kiss yeah and then you got a
00:49:50.920
kiss yes and and i have a question octavian are there monsters in the woods yes they are are they
00:49:58.240
scary monsters i understand monster stories now i understand why the witches live in the woods
00:50:02.380
and they are and they are fast and they can kill me easily yeah yes easily thank you i was explaining
00:50:10.260
because we have wolves around our property big ones i've seen them too we're about to take a vacation
00:50:14.200
to a place where there are bears and we have seen bears and they are very large bears yeah oh my gosh
00:50:19.680
they're so scary right yeah so you remember very well do not walk away from us when we're outside
00:50:26.140
okay octavian yeah no malcolm will you go pick up the kids octavian do you think that kids with a lot of
00:50:33.860
money or kids with a little bit of money are more happy kids with a lot of money why would kids with a lot
00:50:51.020
do you think that money might make you unhappy it will make me
00:50:57.420
what happier and skyden why would money make you a lot happier and excited octavian
00:51:04.140
because if i have money i'll be much happier why will money make you happier octavian
00:51:12.600
because thumbs up octavian what makes kids happy
00:51:21.200
titan hi i like a lot of money well i do like a lot of money i'm crazy
00:51:30.380
you like a lot of money but torsen doesn't like a lot of money yes what would you do with a lot of
00:51:39.980
and what will you do with all the things you buy what would you buy first if you got all the money
00:51:44.660
in the world i will buy everything i want in this entire world so i can play and will you be happy
00:51:52.780
with those things because you don't play with your toys that much
00:51:56.100
yeah you don't really play with your toys you mostly play with boxes what if you had a lot of
00:52:01.320
money but you could never play with a box again yeah i ain't gotta play with i like playing with
00:52:07.220
boxes only would you choose money or boxes boxes over toys he said boxes over toys yeah so boxes are
00:52:14.740
more important than money right yeah well if i play with toys they'll be pretty boring pretty boring
00:52:22.140
okay yeah so what if you could have a lot of money but you couldn't go play at the creek
00:52:26.140
would you rather play at the creek or have a lot of money
00:52:31.800
no you can't do both you have to choose would you like to play at the creek or have lots of toys
00:52:39.360
what about what about what about the boat would you rather have a lot of money or play with the
00:52:46.860
boat that's so big okay okay you want to go to the creek right now josey yeah i want to go
00:52:54.240
at the creek again okay hold on hold on hold on why don't you say would you rather have lots of
00:52:59.640
money or go to the creek i just want to go at the creek okay okay toasty do you want money or do you
00:53:06.480
want rocks torsson torsson torsson toasty hi do you want money or do you want rocks i don't want money
00:53:15.860
i want to go at the creek oh my he wants to go at the creek i'll take you to the creek my friend
00:53:22.320
titan titan do you want money or do you want baby deer he's so mad right yeah he's so mad but you see my
00:53:31.280
kids love the creek titan though it's dangerous titan do you want money or do you want baby deer
00:53:37.460
she wants baby deer are you sure you want baby deer more than
00:53:43.660
take you kick me out of here all right michael i'm gonna come down i love you
00:53:50.840
give thumbs up guys thumbs up thumbs up and subscribe right like and subscribe like and scribe