The Charlie Kirk Show - Charlie's Last Long-Form Interview: Luxury Beliefs with Rob Henderson

00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.

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00:01:09.000 Okay, everybody, very special conversation for you today.

00:01:12.000 We are here with Rob Henderson.

00:01:13.000 Rob, great to see you.

00:01:14.000 Charlie Yarn.

00:01:14.000 Author of this important book, Troubled, the Memoir of Foster Care Family and Social Class.

00:01:20.000 I do want to spend time on this, and we will.

00:01:22.000 You are also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a prolific Substack writer, 75,000 subscribers.

00:01:29.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:01:29.000 Congratulations.

00:01:30.000 And I want to ask all about that.

00:01:32.000 And you have a PhD from Cambridge.

00:01:34.000 That's right.

00:01:35.000 You know, I've been to Cambridge once.

00:01:36.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:01:36.000 Oh, yeah.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:38.000 We had a mostly peaceful debate.

00:01:41.000 So congratulations on all your success.

00:01:44.000 Thanks.

00:01:44.000 I first learned about you.

00:01:46.000 I was on a long flight from Phoenix to Cincinnati to go campaign for J.D. Vance when he was still a Senate candidate.

00:01:55.000 This was right before the primary.

00:01:56.000 And I was, I own, for whatever reason, my podcast app automatically downloaded all the Jordan Peterson conversations.

00:02:02.000 So I only could, because I couldn't have enough Wi-Fi to download the others.

00:02:06.000 And I was like, ooh, luxury beliefs.

00:02:07.000 That's interesting.

00:02:08.000 And I heard you at Jordan, and I loved it.

00:02:10.000 And so it's an honor to have you here.

00:02:11.000 And that's really kind of first, let's take a step back.

00:02:14.000 Who are you?

00:02:15.000 Introduce yourself further.

00:02:16.000 How'd you get into this space of public commentary?

00:02:19.000 Yeah.

00:02:19.000 So first, yeah, it's a real honor to be here, Charlie.

00:02:19.000 Oh, sure.

00:02:23.000 Well, like you said, I acquired a PhD from Cambridge in psychology.

00:02:27.000 I'm a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

00:02:29.000 Before that, I studied psychology at Yale, but before this, my life was a lot different.

00:02:35.000 So very briefly, backing up, you described this in my book, Troubled.

00:02:40.000 I was born into poverty in Los Angeles.

00:02:42.000 Never knew my father.

00:02:44.000 My mother and I, we were homeless for a time.

00:02:47.000 I was eventually put into the foster care system, bounced around different homes all over LA County for a while.

00:02:54.000 And eventually I was adopted into this working class town in Northern California.

00:02:58.000 And there was a lot of chaos, disorder, financial catastrophes.

00:03:03.000 I got this front row seat into a lot of what J.D. Vance talks about.

00:03:08.000 It feels like an Angelino hillbilly elegy.

00:03:12.000 It's an Angelino elegy.

00:03:14.000 Yeah, it's kind of, yeah, like a California version of that.

00:03:16.000 It sounds like incredibly successful.

00:03:19.000 Well, thanks.

00:03:20.000 Yeah.

00:03:20.000 And so, you know, after experiencing all of that disorder, I had to get out of there as soon as I could.

00:03:27.000 So I fled, enlisted in the Air Force when I was 17.

00:03:31.000 And with some hiccups and missteps along the way, eventually I found myself at Yale on the GI Bill and then off to Cambridge on a scholarship.

00:03:41.000 And throughout that experience, traveling along the class ladder, I was fascinated by these class differences, the differences between the people who I grew up around in the foster homes in LA, this working class town in Northern California, the people I served with in the military.

00:03:59.000 And then I get to Yale and I'm hearing all kinds of strange, bizarre, newfangled ideas that I'd never heard before expressed with such confidence.

00:04:08.000 So, I mean, there were two differences there.

00:04:10.000 One, the unusual beliefs, but then two, the self-assuredness with which they were expressed.

00:04:16.000 And during that period, I was also reading a lot about the sociology of class, the psychology of status.

00:04:21.000 And one day, finally in grad school, it came to me: luxury beliefs.

00:04:25.000 Luxury beliefs have replaced luxury goods in many cases.

00:04:29.000 And so, what these luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent and the credentialed, while often inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society.

00:04:41.000 And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief.

00:04:49.000 And the elite universities are where these beliefs are born, where they're conceived and born, and then they're propagated throughout the media and then throughout the rest of society.

00:05:00.000 And the people who pass through these institutions wield outsized influence on culture, on policy, on discourse, on the stories and aspirations we have and that we tell ourselves.

00:05:11.000 And then you see that often the people who promote them are unscathed, unaffected, and then the rest of us have to suffer whatsoever.

00:05:21.000 So you are the second person now.

00:05:23.000 I mean, we had Mr. Siberian here yesterday from the Washington Free Beacon, who also was saying the same thing about Yale.

00:05:28.000 So that's two for two.

00:05:30.000 Yeah, I knew Aaron at Yale.

00:05:32.000 Really smart guy.

00:05:33.000 She went there simultaneously with him?

00:05:34.000 Yeah, he was a couple years ahead of me.

00:05:36.000 Really, I read his stuff for luck.

00:05:37.000 Incredibly smart, thoughtful.

00:05:39.000 So I really want to spend time on luxury beliefs.

00:05:41.000 So just the audience, I think this is a game-changing analysis because it really puts a very crisp and sharp marker on what we're living through.

00:05:51.000 The best of all examples, I think, I want your thoughts, is defund the police.

00:05:54.000 Oh, yeah.

00:05:55.000 So defund the police got really big in the summer of 2020, but largely pushed by upper middle class PhDs and college educated, imposed upon the rest of society, but they are immune from, as you say, the consequences or the costs.

00:06:10.000 This is something that you'd hear at a cocktail party in Kenny Bunkport or in Aspen, where they're like, you know, yeah, defund the police, but they know they will never have to live with what that means.

00:06:23.000 Can you dive deeper into that?

00:06:24.000 Yeah, well, it was fascinating to me because I coined the luxury beliefs idea in 2019.

00:06:30.000 I was procrastinating on a research paper I was working on, and I started tweeting and writing essays and the luxury beliefs idea.

00:06:37.000 I could have never predicted in a million years that within a matter of months, the elites would be saying defund the police.

00:06:44.000 That was so far outside.

00:06:45.000 Luxury beliefs.

00:06:46.000 I had all these other ideas about what luxury beliefs were.

00:06:48.000 Defund the police is such a clear and crisp example.

00:06:50.000 That's a perfect example.

00:06:52.000 And it was surreal.

00:06:55.000 All of these institutions lined up to support this.

00:06:57.000 There was a period where, depending on where you worked, if you posted something online in support of law enforcement, you could lose your job.

00:07:03.000 That's how crazy things got.

00:07:05.000 And so I thought, okay, well, I was a PhD student.

00:07:07.000 I'm studying social science.

00:07:08.000 Well, what do the surveys say?

00:07:09.000 What do the data say?

00:07:10.000 What do actual Americans believe about reducing spending for law enforcement?

00:07:14.000 And I looked at the data, multiple surveys throughout that period.

00:07:17.000 If you break down the results by income category, it was always the highest income Americans who were the most in support of defunding the police.

00:07:23.000 The lowest income Americans were always the least in support of defunding the police.

00:07:27.000 The higher up you go in education, the more support you saw.

00:07:27.000 Same with education.

00:07:30.000 And even when you break down the data by political orientation, white progressives were the most in favor of defunding the police, and black and Hispanic Democrats were less in favor of it.

00:07:40.000 And so this is a clear example here where the people who live in gated communities, safe neighborhoods, low crime zip codes, they were the ones who were promoting this idea that we don't need police, that we need to hire social workers and violence interrupters.

00:07:56.000 And then what did you see from the period of 2020 to 2022?

00:08:00.000 Violent crime rates skyrocketed.

00:08:02.000 And poor people, low-income people, are always the most affected by crime because they're the ones who live in those low-income areas, those high-crime areas.

00:08:11.000 And there are far more victims of crime than there are perpetrators.

00:08:16.000 There's a small number of people who commit most of the crimes.

00:08:18.000 And most of the people they victimize are people who are in their proximity near them.

00:08:22.000 other poor people.

00:08:23.000 And that's why, that's one reason, among others, why they did not support this movement.

00:08:27.000 And yet you would open the pages of the New York Times, elite media outlets, and they would be writing, publishing op-eds and essays and so on about how we needed to rethink and reimagine law enforcement and policing.

00:08:40.000 And it wasn't until you started to see public disorder start to affect the upper middle class in some cases when they started to have to hire off-duty police and private security guards.

00:08:50.000 And they were slowly becoming affected by it that suddenly you started to see a lot of counties and a lot of cities rethink this idea.

00:08:57.000 And what about the- But they were never affected then.

00:09:00.000 If they were never affected, I think we would still be seeing those violent crimes.

00:09:04.000 That is so sick.

00:09:06.000 So you're saying that the luxury belief model is I truly don't care how the rest of the country lives.

00:09:12.000 But explain the social aspects.

00:09:15.000 I mean, you have a PhD in psychology from Cambridge.

00:09:18.000 So if you were to kind of psychoanalyze, you know, a little pop psychology, someone who is at that cocktail party bragging about, well, I am in favor of defund the police.

00:09:29.000 What is going on there?

00:09:30.000 Yeah.

00:09:30.000 Well, so I'll give you a very sort of potted summary of how luxury beliefs came to signify status increasingly.

00:09:38.000 So you go back to something like 1899 when Thorsten Vabelin wrote this book called The Theory of the Leisure Class.

00:09:44.000 So he was an economist and sociologist at the turn of the 20th century.

00:09:48.000 And Veblen wrote about how the elites of his day would signal status with luxury goods, material possessions.

00:09:54.000 So, you know, tuxedos, expensive evening gowns, top hats, pocket watches, monocles, servants, butlers, this kind of thing.

00:10:03.000 Expensive trips.

00:10:04.000 Exactly.

00:10:04.000 And attending the lavish events.

00:10:06.000 And then if you fast forward to the mid-20th century, a sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu wrote a book called Distinction, a social critique of the judgment of taste.

00:10:15.000 And in that book, he coined this phrase, cultural capital.

00:10:19.000 And the idea here is that elites, they would convert their economic capital into cultural capital.

00:10:24.000 So they'd have all this money.

00:10:25.000 What do they do with the money?

00:10:26.000 They attend expensive schools and then they learn intricate and arcane knowledge about wine and art and exotic locations to have interesting things to say at cocktail parties.

00:10:36.000 My claim is that today, the latest expression of cultural capital is luxury beliefs.

00:10:41.000 So now if you hang around elite circles, increasingly it's about these kind of moral signaling, luxury beliefs, this idea about how we need to reimagine society.

00:10:51.000 If the conventional view is X, I'm going to take this oppositional view.

00:10:54.000 I'm going to believe Y. If most Americans want a strong police force, how do I signal my expensive education and my sophisticated views and beliefs?

00:11:04.000 And the fact that I have the time on my hands to read elite media outlets and that I hang around the right circles and hold the proper views.

00:11:13.000 Well, you express these luxury beliefs, these interesting ideas and opinions are interesting to you and your circle anyway.

00:11:19.000 And so this is the latest expression, I think, of cultural capital.

00:11:24.000 The other thing, the other interesting piece of this is sometimes when I talk about luxury beliefs, people will say, you know, Rob, is it really true that the elites care so much about status?

00:11:32.000 Or they'll say, well, don't we all care about status?

00:11:34.000 Why are you picking on the elite so much?

00:11:36.000 Well, there have been two very interesting studies over the last couple of years which have both came to the same conclusion.

00:11:42.000 So this is a replicated study conducted twice independently, which found that the higher up you go in terms of socioeconomic status, the stronger people report a desire for wealth and status.

00:11:53.000 So, people who are at or near the top of educational attainment, income, prestige, you ask them questions like, you know, you show them statements and ask them the extent to which they agree with these statements.

00:12:08.000 It would please me to be in a position of power over others.

00:12:11.000 It's important for me that people look at me when I walk into a room.

00:12:15.000 It's critical that I have influence over my peers.

00:12:19.000 The higher up you go in socioeconomic status, the more likely people are to agree with those statements.

00:12:23.000 So they care a lot about status.

00:12:25.000 It's highly important to them.

00:12:27.000 And luxury beliefs are one way that they show that.

00:12:29.000 Yeah, and it manifests in ways like defund the police, but it also goes to people that are bragging about, I have a trans kid.

00:12:37.000 And like, yeah, you know, that's kind of like a new status marker that if you have a trans kid, all of a sudden you're like in the end crowd, you're very open-minded and I'm progressive and I'm not imposing my gender binary norms upon my kid who I will not call a son or a daughter.

00:12:56.000 And so this obviously stems from the academy largely.

00:13:01.000 And it's gotten a lot worse.

00:13:02.000 I mean, Angelo Cotavilla termed the phrase ruling class.

00:13:06.000 And so I think it's all these phrases you wrote, you know, you wrote cultural capital, leisure class, ruling class, luxury belief.

00:13:13.000 What we're really talking about is the quote-unquote elites or the decision makers, which is a small percentage of the American population, but they wield an outsized size of influence.

00:13:23.000 You and I are not Marxists.

00:13:24.000 We believe that some people will be elites.

00:13:26.000 And not only should you have them, you're always going to have them.

00:13:29.000 It's a fact of the natural law.

00:13:31.000 Someone is going to ascend with more.

00:13:33.000 Egalitarianism is not just a bad idea.

00:13:36.000 It's an impossible idea.

00:13:37.000 And if you try to do it, it actually creates more inequality.

00:13:40.000 So the question is, can we get better elites?

00:13:43.000 Yes.

00:13:44.000 Isn't that the important question?

00:13:45.000 Right.

00:13:46.000 Virtuous ones.

00:13:47.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:13:48.000 And yes, I'm not a Marxist.

00:13:49.000 And what's funny is that even in communist societies, they have elites, right?

00:13:52.000 Well, of course.

00:13:53.000 In fact, they have more power than the elites of Western liberal democratic countries.

00:13:57.000 Yeah, ironically, right?

00:13:58.000 And so much of, you know, we can talk about that later, but so much of what's driving the Marxists, I think, is a desire for power.

00:14:03.000 But yes, we want better elites.

00:14:06.000 And I think that our elites, I wouldn't spend so much time pointing out their shortcomings if I didn't believe they were capable of being better.

00:14:13.000 And I think that the institutions that train them could probably do a better job of selecting the candidates, to be honest.

00:14:18.000 But once they pass through these institutions, you hold a large obligation, a responsibility.

00:14:23.000 You have been given a series of gifts, your intelligence, conscientiousness, your education, your affluence, your parents, your credential.

00:14:32.000 And I think a lot of people are aware of this and they're just going about this, fulfilling that obligation in the wrong way, where they have this very sort of narrow view of what poverty is, of what struggle is, what strife is.

00:14:45.000 And they think, well, I want to help poor people.

00:14:47.000 And I'm not going to spend the time learning about them.

00:14:51.000 But I see police are sometimes mean to criminals who happen to be poor and therefore let's just defund the police.

00:14:58.000 It's a very sort of lazy way of thinking.

00:15:01.000 It's unwilling, this unwillingness to learn about those communities think, well, what will actually help them?

00:15:05.000 Actually, having policing around is good for them because not all poor people are the same.

00:15:09.000 Most people do not commit crimes.

00:15:11.000 The vast majority of them, they work, they want to take care of their families.

00:15:14.000 They clock in, they clock out, and they don't want to be harassed or robbed or assaulted.

00:15:20.000 But the thing is, a lot of people who pass through elite institutions have no contact with ordinary working class people.

00:15:26.000 And so they get this, you know, this warped and distorted view of what that actually means.

00:15:33.000 And so, yes, our elites could do more to understand the society that they so do you think, as a psychologist, do you think this luxury belief phenomenon is filling a void, a metaphysical one or an existential one?

00:15:46.000 I just, again, I'm very religious.

00:15:48.000 I don't know how you say it.

00:15:49.000 I don't want to impose any beliefs here.

00:15:51.000 Just, I'm curious that, like, how many people that have luxury beliefs go to church every Sunday?

00:15:56.000 Probably a low correlation.

00:15:58.000 You would probably agree with that.

00:15:59.000 I would imagine very low.

00:16:01.000 There have been a lot of interesting studies on this of people who are highly educated and report low levels of religiosity, of service attendance.

00:16:11.000 They're the most actively engaged with politics.

00:16:14.000 They're more likely to get involved with political organizations and activism and attempt to exert their moral view over other people.

00:16:24.000 And you see this, I think, a lot with people who are involved, especially with kind of left-wing activism.

00:16:31.000 This is one reason, among others, why people on the political right are happier than people on the political left.

00:16:36.000 Is that proven?

00:16:37.000 Religiosity.

00:16:38.000 This has been.

00:16:38.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:16:39.000 So the reasons are debated, but the fact itself is.

00:16:42.000 Let's talk more about it because people say they scream at me and say, that's not true, as they're obviously quite happy.

00:16:46.000 I mean, it's funny because so you get two responses.

00:16:48.000 One is that's not true, and I'm angry about it.

00:16:50.000 The other is, oh, ignorance is bliss, like that kind of thing.

00:16:53.000 Oh, the right thing is that let's explore both.

00:16:55.000 So, first is what does the data show?

00:16:57.000 Well, the data show, and this is unambiguous, that people who identify as conservatives or people who identify as the political right, they are happier, regardless of how you measure happiness, whether you measure it through sort of moment-to-moment positive emotions and experiences, or when you ask people about what's sometimes called life satisfaction, stepping back and evaluating your life as a whole, how satisfied are you with your life?

00:17:20.000 And people on the right also report being more satisfied, higher levels of well-being, regardless of the measure you choose.

00:17:26.000 And people on the left report being less satisfied.

00:17:30.000 And people have attempted to explore the mechanisms, what are the causes, and one seems to be religiosity, that people who attend religious services are happier.

00:17:39.000 There was one interesting study which found that if you attend, so going from not attending any religious service at all to attending at least one religious service per week has the equivalent increase on happiness as going from the bottom income quintile to the top income quintile.

00:17:54.000 Yeah, which is, I mean, that's.

00:17:55.000 And this is all, this is an irrefutable detail.

00:17:57.000 Yeah, this is, yeah, this is irrefutable.

00:17:59.000 And what's interesting to me is that we spend so much time talking about poverty, income inequality, so on and so forth.

00:18:04.000 But if you want to raise well-being, well, one might be attend a religious service.

00:18:08.000 I mean, that's a lot less expensive than trying to redistribute or raising everyone's income by $100,000.

00:18:15.000 What you're saying is that Zoran Mamdani should be saying everyone should go to St. Patrick's Cathedral, not government-run grocery stores.

00:18:22.000 I mean, you know, there's data behind it.

00:18:24.000 Well, it depends on what his goals are.

00:18:26.000 You know, his explicit avowed goals are.

00:18:28.000 If he wanted happiness for the city, but now we have other.

00:18:31.000 I'm going to get into the intentions.

00:18:33.000 So that's so comforting because we know this to be true.

00:18:37.000 We kind of see it in our own lived experiences.

00:18:39.000 So those that are pushing luxury beliefs probably are not super happy, or at least would be just living a joyful life.

00:18:48.000 I don't think they would have joy.

00:18:49.000 I don't think anyone that wants to defund the police is a joyful person.

00:18:52.000 I just, I don't find that.

00:18:54.000 Maybe you do.

00:18:55.000 I don't think that's correct.

00:18:57.000 But so, but the is part of this, though, part of it is this contradiction because they think they're being contrarian to the rest of society, but no one checks them in their place when they say this stuff.

00:19:11.000 I mean, you go to some of these environments.

00:19:14.000 Again, you could go to any one of these summer enclaves that I could list, right?

00:19:18.000 Kenny Bunkport, Aspen, you know, Big Sky, Yellowstone Club, wherever, Jackson Hole.

00:19:23.000 And they say this stuff at their liberal dinner parties.

00:19:26.000 And it's just this homogenization, right?

00:19:30.000 So in some ways, they're not rebelling against anything.

00:19:32.000 It's actually an act of conformity.

00:19:34.000 Yes.

00:19:35.000 Would you agree with that?

00:19:36.000 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:19:36.000 Yeah.

00:19:37.000 Where it depends on sort of the reference group.

00:19:40.000 So if you're comparing them to society as a whole, they're very Americans.

00:19:45.000 But to their peers.

00:19:46.000 Yes.

00:19:46.000 Yeah, to their peers, they have to.

00:19:48.000 The contrarian thing would be like, no, I love Trump's takeover of DC.

00:19:51.000 Right.

00:19:52.000 That would be a statement to say in Jackson Hole.

00:19:56.000 Right.

00:19:56.000 Yeah.

00:19:57.000 In Tucon County.

00:19:58.000 Yeah.

00:19:58.000 And yeah, it's that there are these kind of social contagion effects where, you know, if you spend most of your time with people in the top income decile, similarly credentialed people to yourself, you may view yourself as this intellectual iconoclast or this sophisticated, interesting, creative person.

00:20:16.000 But actually, if you look at the, you know, the groups that you spend the most time around, chances are there's very little daylight between your beliefs and theirs.

00:20:23.000 So there actually isn't as much rebellion, I think, as you might expect.

00:20:25.000 Yeah.

00:20:26.000 And so are you, do you think that do we need better luxury beliefs?

00:20:30.000 I mean, oh, no, not no.

00:20:33.000 Or just get rid of this whole genre altogether, meaning that the bourgeoisie should not have different values than the proletariat.

00:20:42.000 I mean, I use a Marxist distinction.

00:20:45.000 Yeah.

00:20:45.000 Well, I've written about this in different outlets, Substack and elsewhere, and sometimes I think the best thing to do would just be to let the rich buy yachts, buy expensive things, go back to the… Just get out of our way.

00:20:59.000 Yeah, go back to the Weblin era where you're just like buying name-brand clothes or whatever and leave the rest of us alone kind of thing.

00:21:05.000 But because they need to buy newspapers, that's the other thing.

00:21:11.000 The status markers are influence now.

00:21:13.000 Sports teams, companies, social media companies, right?

00:21:16.000 That's now the new currency.

00:21:18.000 Yeah.

00:21:19.000 And so if there are going to be beliefs that elevate your status, I think they should choose beliefs that do not hurt people who are beneath them.

00:21:30.000 So that's how I define luxury beliefs.

00:21:32.000 A luxury belief is: does it confer status to the credentialed affluent person?

00:21:37.000 And does it also inflict costs on less fortunate members of society?

00:21:40.000 But there can also be beliefs that are good for people and that are disproportionately held by higher income credentialed people as well.

00:21:50.000 And so I think it would just be worth sort of going through, okay, what are the beliefs?

00:21:53.000 What are the political views?

00:21:54.000 What are the policies that I'm promoting?

00:21:57.000 And first, if they make you look good, great.

00:21:59.000 And then if they help people, they're not bad because they're held by elites.

00:22:03.000 They're bad because they're bad.

00:22:03.000 Yes.

00:22:05.000 Yes.

00:22:05.000 And can you elaborate on that?

00:22:07.000 Because elites can actually hold really good ideas.

00:22:09.000 Yes, of course.

00:22:10.000 If an elite is saying, hey, get married, have children, don't commit crimes, that's awesome.

00:22:15.000 Yes, that would be fantastic.

00:22:16.000 Just because an elite holds a view inherently does not make it bad.

00:22:19.000 It just so happens our elites hold terrible views.

00:22:21.000 That's correct.

00:22:22.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:22:23.000 And so it's bad because it's bad, and it's bad because elites wield disproportionate influence on society.

00:22:28.000 There's a study from 2014 which found that if you support a political policy and you're in the top income decile, it's twice as likely as average to be enacted and to be implemented into law.

00:22:40.000 And so yes, they're bad because they're bad.

00:22:42.000 There are beliefs that are held, you know, concentrated among elites that are good for society and that elites are more likely to hold than the rest.

00:22:51.000 So something like free market principles, for example, a lot of less educated people, they have difficulty understanding free market economics, for example.

00:22:58.000 And so if you ask them point blank, they often tend to intuitively, in their gut feeling, hold these kind of semi-socialist views, perhaps because they haven't been educated on how economics works.

00:23:07.000 And a lot of elites actually do hold more free market principles.

00:23:09.000 So that would be an example of a good belief that isn't a luxury belief.

00:23:12.000 Yeah.

00:23:13.000 And the ones, though, that are just the ones especially that the elite markers have held, the elite, whatever, foreign policy for sure.

00:23:23.000 And then this crime stuff is out of control.

00:23:25.000 And the social stuff.

00:23:27.000 The trans, the BLM, the wokeism. 0.91

00:23:30.000 That stuff is deeply unpopular the lower you go on the income ladder.

00:23:35.000 And so I think we need to take, we just need to compare things of whether or not they are good or bad.

00:23:41.000 But the reason you're so effective is that we should hold our elites to a higher standard.

00:23:47.000 They don't get an excuse.

00:23:49.000 Is that right?

00:23:50.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:23:50.000 They don't get, and you're uniquely positioned to say this as someone who grew up in a very, you know, as your book says, troubled environment.

00:23:59.000 You should know better.

00:24:01.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:24:03.000 And they, yeah, they should be held to a higher standard.

00:24:06.000 And they, just because they're increasingly isolated, that doesn't diminish their influence, for better or worse.

00:24:14.000 And so, you know, if they're going to wield this influence, they have these responsibilities, these duties, these obligations.

00:24:20.000 And this used to be taken for granted: that if you are a member of the elite, modern aristocracy, the ruling class, however you want to define them, that they should actually try to push policies and laws and ideas that make life better and not worse.

00:24:37.000 And, you know, you listed some of those woke ideas of transgenderism and other things.

00:24:41.000 But in my view, and the one that I spend probably the most time talking about in the book is this denigration of the family.

00:24:48.000 So famously, you know, in 2020 in the BLM website, it was we need to dismantle the Western notion of perfection.

00:24:56.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:57.000 Yeah, it's insane.

00:24:58.000 And yeah, they took that down later, but that is, you know, you can see it.

00:25:02.000 It lives forever on the internet.

00:25:04.000 And that is just the latest manifestation of this.

00:25:07.000 That idea has been pushed particularly by credentialed leftists for decades that we need to dismantle the family.

00:25:14.000 And what has happened?

00:25:15.000 Well, among people who pass through elite institutions, the higher up you go in socioeconomic status, the more intact families are, the least amount of divorce you see, the more importance they place on family and their own personal lives.

00:25:30.000 But then when you ask them about their views in general about marriage and about family norms, they take this very laissez-faire, relaxed, permissive, like every family's just as good as any other.

00:25:40.000 We shouldn't say anything about single parents.

00:25:41.000 We shouldn't say anything about anything.

00:25:44.000 And yet, you know, you look at how they live.

00:25:49.000 We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries.

00:25:52.000 And today, I want to point you to their podcast.

00:25:54.000 It's called Culture in Christianity: the Allen Jackson Podcast.

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00:26:51.000 Sometimes when I talk about the luxury beliefs class, I say that they walk the 50s and talk the 60s.

00:26:56.000 Talk more about that.

00:26:58.000 So if they're walking the 50s.

00:26:59.000 They're walking a Norman Rockwell painting.

00:27:01.000 Exactly.

00:27:03.000 But they're so they talk the 60s.

00:27:05.000 So they talk like they're at Woodstock.

00:27:07.000 Yes.

00:27:08.000 And yet they live like they're in a Norman Rockwell painting.

00:27:10.000 That's correct.

00:27:11.000 Yes.

00:27:12.000 Peace, love.

00:27:13.000 Don't do that in my home.

00:27:15.000 So they're like strict administrators of order and discipline in their own life.

00:27:22.000 But outwardly, they have, you know, peace, love, rock and roll.

00:27:22.000 Yes.

00:27:25.000 I don't care if you do weed.

00:27:27.000 Yeah, just but it can't be my kids and it can't be my neighborhood and not my zip code.

00:27:31.000 Yes.

00:27:31.000 But everyone else, you know, have a good time out there.

00:27:33.000 But isn't there something inherently Doesn't this inherently create the kind of the prerequisites of a political revolution in a bad way, where you have an elite ruling class that imposes something they don't want to live under repeatedly.

00:27:51.000 I mean, a good one is school choice, right?

00:27:53.000 They're all against school choice, many of them.

00:27:55.000 And yet they'll send their kid to a private school or firearms.

00:27:58.000 You know, they have gated communities and they're against walls.

00:28:01.000 I mean, you see all of these inherent contradictions.

00:28:03.000 And for a working person, that creates a lot of resentment.

00:28:07.000 And that's bad.

00:28:08.000 We actually don't want resentment.

00:28:09.000 We want our elites to be respected.

00:28:11.000 We want people that are at the highest income ladder to be role models and icons and people that we could tell our kids to point towards.

00:28:18.000 You said something I want to explore.

00:28:20.000 Two of my favorite words you use back to back, duties and obligation.

00:28:25.000 I feel as if we never use those words anymore.

00:28:28.000 Especially when it comes to the rich or the, why is that?

00:28:33.000 Well, I think because we are at least explicitly, we're attempting to create this egalitarian society.

00:28:42.000 No one's better than anyone else, you know, attempting to retreat into these non-judgmental attitudes.

00:28:47.000 But what's interesting is that that kind of approach of don't judge people, let people enjoy things, live your life, you do you, that applies for when it comes to judging people for violating those conventional virtues of family, respect, integrity, punctuality, law-abidingness, all of those things that something like our grandparents would have agreed with.

00:29:08.000 But when it comes to other things, many credentialed elites are happy to judge you for failing to recycle.

00:29:15.000 Of course, they're the most judgmental people in society.

00:29:18.000 Right.

00:29:19.000 And so they've shifted that energy.

00:29:21.000 But then if you're pro-life, they're judging you.

00:29:23.000 I mean, you vote for Trump.

00:29:25.000 I mean, the people that say do not judge you.

00:29:26.000 We're a MAGA hat in New York City.

00:29:28.000 It doesn't go very well.

00:29:29.000 Yes, yeah.

00:29:29.000 And so that moral energy, that feeling of, oh, I want to tell the lower orders how to live.

00:29:36.000 Well, they've abandoned that when it comes to living a good life, a healthy life, a life that leads to flourishing.

00:29:42.000 They're very hands-off with that.

00:29:44.000 But then when it comes to, yeah, your political views, using an outdated term for a certain group or for not supporting the latest thing on climate change or whatever, then suddenly the fangs come out and they're happy to condemn you.

00:29:57.000 The puritanical energy is reignited.

00:30:00.000 This is a great transition to this phenomenal piece that you wrote this summer, Zoran Mamdani's Luxury Beliefs.

00:30:08.000 The first line is really amazing.

00:30:10.000 The luxury belief class, because you've really designated them as a class, has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor. 0.78

00:30:23.000 Tell us more.

00:30:24.000 Well, if you look at the political views of the people who were forming these encampments at places like Yale and Columbia and elsewhere, they held very far-left progressive radical views.

00:30:34.000 And a lot of people by now, and I'm sure you and many of your listeners have seen the social media posts of Momdani from 2020 and 2021.

00:30:41.000 What I found funny about the Momdani posts from that era was they weren't just the sort of normal boilerplate woke stuff.

00:30:47.000 It was a voicer level.

00:30:48.000 Yeah, it wasn't just defund the police.

00:30:50.000 It was defund the police as a queer feminist issue. 1.00

00:30:53.000 It was this sort of like over-embellished, toxic, outrageous.

00:30:57.000 Yeah, it was like things that you wouldn't see anywhere else unless you pass through these institutions where it's not enough to just say defund the police.

00:31:03.000 It was, you know, it's a queer feminist, all this sort of weird terminology and all the sort of mental gymnastics required to express these bizarre views. 1.00

00:31:12.000 And, you know, Momdani has, it's funny, he sort of walked away, walked back from some of those views, and he's pivoted more towards this sort of overt economic socialism, the sort of communist ideas.

00:31:24.000 But, you know, those two things are intertwined.

00:31:26.000 You and many of your listeners, and I'm sure a lot of people have made this point that wokeness is a kind of variant of Marxism.

00:31:33.000 And so he was a communist.

00:31:35.000 I mean, he still is, right?

00:31:36.000 Democratic socialist.

00:31:37.000 He's a constant.

00:31:37.000 And he's a Marxist.

00:31:39.000 And he's, you know, a supporter of wokeness.

00:31:41.000 And that is the kind of ideology that you see prevailing at elite institutions.

00:31:47.000 So do you live in New York?

00:31:49.000 I do.

00:31:49.000 For now.

00:31:50.000 What is this?

00:31:52.000 What is going on here?

00:31:53.000 You know, I moved there less than a year ago.

00:31:57.000 And at that point in the polls, Mom Donnie was not, you know, he was treated as an unserious candidate.

00:32:03.000 And now we're seeing, you know, New York's changed a lot.

00:32:07.000 You're seeing a lot of people.

00:32:09.000 What's interesting is that in New York, if you live there in the first place, you already have to be pretty well off, especially if you live in Manhattan.

00:32:17.000 And the demographics of Manhattan have changed quite a bit where a lot of people who live there, they have bachelor's degrees, they have upper-middle-class jobs.

00:32:24.000 And like I said before, the people who are educated and people who are well-off, they're the most likely to hold these kind of left-wing luxury beliefs, these radical, newfangled views.

00:32:34.000 And then they look at someone like Mom Donnie and they kind of see someone like themselves, right?

00:32:38.000 And there's a lot of kind of malicious envy going on here where they're mad because they're in the top 10% and not in the top 1%.

00:32:46.000 And they see this kind of, you know, Mom Donnie's, he's kind of a Nepo baby, right? 0.99

00:32:51.000 Like he's kind of this fail son who had well-off parents and he's kind of been floundering in his career for a while and he got this footing in politics where all you have to do is mouth the right slogans and say the right things.

00:33:02.000 And in a place like New York, yeah, people are willing to support someone like that.

00:33:07.000 How was he floundering in his career?

00:33:09.000 Well, did you see what was happening before he was an assemblyman?

00:33:13.000 This is a lot of local New York stuff.

00:33:14.000 So nationalize it for us.

00:33:15.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:16.000 So Mom Donnie, he, well, first, one of your former guests helped to break the news.

00:33:22.000 You know, remember when Mom Donnie said that he was an African-American?

00:33:25.000 Oh, yeah.

00:33:26.000 Yeah.

00:33:26.000 And when he applied to Columbia and still didn't get in, despite so he claimed to be black slash African American, despite the fact that both of his parents are ethnically Indian.

00:33:35.000 I know he spent a couple of years in Uganda, but if you and I go to Uganda and then we apply to college, we're not going to mark that we're black, but he tried to do that.

00:33:44.000 He still didn't get in.

00:33:46.000 And he went to Bowdoin, which is also an elite institution.

00:33:50.000 And then he had a floundering career.

00:33:52.000 He tried to be, he tried to moonlight as a rapper, didn't get very far.

00:33:56.000 He produced some music for his mother's a rich filmmaker, tried to produce some music for her films to some limited success, but he never really got off the ground in his own career.

00:34:06.000 And finally, I think in his, I think he was around 30 when he ran for whatever, like a county or city assembly, he finally found something that he wasn't terrible at.

00:34:18.000 And politics does seem to attract the worst of our society.

00:34:22.000 Yeah, for better or worse.

00:34:23.000 That's sadly true.

00:34:24.000 Is he going to win?

00:34:27.000 Probably, yes.

00:34:28.000 If you look at the base rates for, you know, if you're the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, you almost always win.

00:34:34.000 There are some rare cases where that doesn't happen.

00:34:36.000 Giuliani, you got Bloomberg.

00:34:39.000 You know, people have been talking about how, because right now you have Cuomo Adams and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican.

00:34:46.000 If two of those people drop out and throw their support behind one of them, there's a possibility that they can defeat Mom Donnie. 0.99

00:34:52.000 But if they don't, then he's probably going to win.

00:34:55.000 And then, yeah, I don't know how much longer I'll be in New York after that.

00:34:59.000 Does that teach us anything about this whole, because your whole piece on luxury beliefs, does that reinforce your thesis?

00:35:05.000 Does it show that these luxury beliefs are still held by a big portion of America's largest city?

00:35:10.000 Or is this kind of just a one-off?

00:35:13.000 Yeah, it's sad because when I talk to some of my more right-leaning friends, they say, well, maybe he should get elected because then the rest of the country will see that as an example.

00:35:24.000 That's the best analysis I've ever heard.

00:35:26.000 But the thing is, the people who vote for him, once his policies are put in place and it actually starts to affect those people who voted him in, a lot of them have means and they can leave.

00:35:36.000 They're going to go to Connecticut.

00:35:38.000 The Coleman Young or something in Detroit did this.

00:35:40.000 I think his name's Young.

00:35:42.000 The Detroit mayor in the 1960s.

00:35:44.000 He ran Detroit into the ground just to rule over the ashes.

00:35:47.000 Everyone left and went to Auburn Hills, but he stayed in power for 20 years.

00:35:50.000 Right, yeah.

00:35:51.000 Yeah.

00:35:52.000 And so it's going to be the people who didn't vote for Mom Dani.

00:35:54.000 And I point that out in that piece, which is that if you look at the demographic breakdown of the voters, poor and working class voters who Momdani claimed to support, you know, he's talking about rent freezes.

00:36:06.000 He's talking about, what, raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour.

00:36:09.000 Those people actually didn't support him in the primaries.

00:36:11.000 They voted for Cuomo.

00:36:14.000 They did not vote for Mom Dani.

00:36:15.000 It was upper middle class people, particularly white progressives who supported Mom Dani.

00:36:20.000 And a lot of those people, if he gets elected and their life starts to deteriorate, yeah, they're going to flee to Connecticut or Jersey or whatever.

00:36:26.000 Let's talk about it.

00:36:27.000 So you have this piece here, Substack.

00:36:30.000 What I told Bobby Kennedy's team at HHS, you have something called the success sequence, and you got a good way of branding stuff.

00:36:37.000 I love that.

00:36:37.000 I'm going to use it.

00:36:38.000 I got to say that's not mine, but I did write about it.

00:36:40.000 I think it started from Brad Wilcox.

00:36:43.000 No, no, no, yeah, yeah.

00:36:43.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:36:44.000 But I mean, here's the thing.

00:36:45.000 You grew up in poverty.

00:36:47.000 So how do we fix poverty in America?

00:36:49.000 Is it through Mom Dani's, you know, social workers, you know, interventionists, whatever, you know, making the city run grocery stores?

00:36:57.000 Or how do we address the poverty issue in so many of our great cities?

00:37:04.000 Well, so the success sequence, there are three simple steps.

00:37:09.000 So if you want to not live in poverty, you follow these three steps.

00:37:13.000 And by age 30, there is a 97% chance you will not be in poverty.

00:37:18.000 And what study is that?

00:37:20.000 This is from Brookings.

00:37:22.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:37:22.000 I'm pretty sure it's out of Brookings.

00:37:22.000 Yeah, okay.

00:37:24.000 Brad Wilcox has written about this.

00:37:26.000 I think it's Isabel Sawhill.

00:37:27.000 But if you just Google Success Sequence, there's a lot of interesting sociological work on this.

00:37:32.000 So the three steps, first, graduate from high school.

00:37:36.000 Second step is get a full-time job.

00:37:38.000 And the third step is get married before you have children.

00:37:41.000 It's that simple.

00:37:42.000 Like those are the three steps.

00:37:43.000 You follow those steps.

00:37:44.000 By the time you're 30, you're almost certainly not going to be living in poverty.

00:37:48.000 And this was the discussion that I had with Robert F. Kennedy's team at HHS.

00:37:54.000 They were interested in these issues around childhood poverty, how to help people who are living in these circumstances, struggling families.

00:38:00.000 And this is a very simple thing that I think could be taught to everyone.

00:38:05.000 there was a survey done a couple of years ago they um asked a representative sample of americans across the political spectrum do you think so they told them here's the success sequence Do you think this should be taught in schools?

00:38:16.000 And 70% of Democrat parents and Republican parents supported this idea of being taught in school.

00:38:21.000 So this is like low-hanging fruit.

00:38:23.000 Most Americans think like, oh, that's like a very simple set of steps.

00:38:26.000 Let's teach the kids, regardless of their political background.

00:38:28.000 But when you look at the elites, there's a raging debate.

00:38:32.000 And you can imagine that Republican elites are like, yeah, like that's obvious.

00:38:35.000 And Democratic elites are like, no, that's terrible.

00:38:38.000 We shouldn't shame poor people.

00:38:39.000 We shouldn't say anything like that.

00:38:41.000 Cause you're implicitly judging them for how they choose to live their lives.

00:38:44.000 If you fail to live up to the success sequence, they might feel bad about themselves.

00:38:48.000 And what I point out in my pieces about the success sequence is it's so simple that you can't really, you can't really help but be able to hold anybody to those standards.

00:39:01.000 So if the success sequence was something like the only way to not live in poverty is first, you got to get a PhD in mathematics from MIT.

00:39:10.000 Second is you got to work 100 hours a week.

00:39:12.000 And third, you got to practice lifelong celibacy.

00:39:15.000 Then you won't live in poverty.

00:39:16.000 The correct response to that is, well, that's not fair.

00:39:19.000 Like no one can live up to those standards.

00:39:20.000 We shouldn't even be talking about this.

00:39:22.000 But if the success sequence is what it actually is, we should be talking about it because just about everyone is capable of fulfilling those steps.

00:39:28.000 You're saying that we don't talk about it because Democrat elites or left-wing whatever progress to be elites, they don't want to come across as preachy or judgy.

00:39:38.000 Even though that's all they do all day long, they preach us about guns and environment, climate change, racism, but they don't want to preach or be judgy about graduating high school, obtaining full-time employment, and marrying before having kids.

00:39:50.000 I think that's the reason because that's the only group that doesn't want this idea to be propagated and to be taught.

00:39:50.000 That's right.

00:39:55.000 And that's the only group that regulates it.

00:39:56.000 Even though they don't live those values.

00:39:58.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:39:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:40:00.000 I mean, many of them are the most likely to live those values.

00:40:02.000 So regardless of your political beliefs, if you went through college and you have a white-collar job and so on, like that, you followed those steps in your own life.

00:40:14.000 The people around you followed those steps.

00:40:17.000 And they are not difficult to follow.

00:40:20.000 And I think that we were talking about this before, what luxury beliefs or what beliefs that could the elites hold that would actually benefit people.

00:40:26.000 I think just talking about this, these simple steps that, look, many people might fall short of those beliefs.

00:40:32.000 They may not actually be able to fulfill them.

00:40:35.000 That doesn't necessarily mean you should discard them or not talk about them.

00:40:38.000 In the same way, by analogy, elites are generally pretty happy to say that you shouldn't use tobacco, right?

00:40:46.000 You shouldn't smoke cigarettes.

00:40:47.000 They're happy to talk about it.

00:40:48.000 That's a great example.

00:40:49.000 A lot of people still smoke cigarettes and they fall short of that.

00:40:52.000 Everyone knows that tobacco is bad for you, but it helps to be taught and to be reminded of this regularly.

00:40:58.000 And even though people fail to cease tobacco use, elites are still willing to talk about it and say that you should quit.

00:41:05.000 So I think by analogy, they should be willing to talk about this.

00:41:07.000 Well, yeah, I mean, they want to run PSAs against racism.

00:41:10.000 So obviously they're willing to impose their value system on others.

00:41:13.000 Yes.

00:41:14.000 They're the ones that push, you know, NFL helmets need to have end racism on it, end racism in the, we need to run these PSAs against hate.

00:41:21.000 Okay, so that is you imposing a value system on the rest of the population.

00:41:26.000 Fine.

00:41:26.000 Okay.

00:41:27.000 But you don't want to actually promote.

00:41:28.000 Imagine instead of these ridiculous, like, oh, stop hate commercials.

00:41:32.000 That does nothing.

00:41:34.000 Or instead of these like anti-tobacco commercials, what if we ran a billion dollars of ads of do these three things and you won't be in poverty?

00:41:40.000 Graduate from high school, obtain full-time employment, marry before having kids.

00:41:44.000 Yeah.

00:41:45.000 No, no, no.

00:41:45.000 Yeah.

00:41:46.000 If you put those three steps up, then yeah, your life will improve.

00:41:46.000 It's that, yeah.

00:41:51.000 Even if you follow one of those, your life will incrementally improve, right?

00:41:54.000 If you graduate from high school, it's better than not graduating.

00:41:57.000 If you get a full-time job, that's better than being unemployed.

00:41:59.000 If you get married before you have kids, it's better than having kids out of wedlock. 0.74

00:42:03.000 Sometimes I joke around.

00:42:04.000 I wrote this other piece called How to Join the Underclass, and I called it the failure formula, which is don't do those steps.

00:42:11.000 How do you live in poverty?

00:42:12.000 Don't graduate from high school.

00:42:13.000 Try to be unemployed.

00:42:15.000 Don't seek employment.

00:42:15.000 Yeah, don't work.

00:42:16.000 We're at full employment.

00:42:17.000 You can get a job if you want a job right now.

00:42:19.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:21.000 I mean, a lot of the issues are not poverty related, despite the fact that you're not.

00:42:26.000 Do you think that poverty is largely a poverty of values?

00:42:29.000 Yes.

00:42:30.000 Now it is.

00:42:31.000 I think decades past, when there was real poverty, kind of the Great Depression era, sort of decades before when our society was less prosperous, poverty was serious.

00:42:43.000 It was dire.

00:42:46.000 There was an interesting article in the New Yorker of all places, which found they reported that in the past, poverty meant you went hungry, and today poverty means you get food stamps, you get government assistance.

00:42:58.000 Like that's the difference.

00:42:59.000 Or that.

00:43:00.000 No, this is another luxury belief, which is the wealthier you are, the thinner you are.

00:43:04.000 I'm sure you've seen that data, which is that if you have a low BMI, you're much more likely to have money.

00:43:09.000 Yes.

00:43:10.000 Then the fatter you are, the more likely that you are actually in poverty.

00:43:14.000 It's the exact opposite, actually.

00:43:16.000 A lot of things have flipped like this.

00:43:16.000 Yeah.

00:43:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:19.000 And it's funny because the people who are well off and have low BMIs, they're often the most enthusiastic about body positivity, healthy at any size.

00:43:30.000 And they post that and share that.

00:43:30.000 And amazing.

00:43:32.000 And they're the ones doing 72-hour fasts.

00:43:34.000 Yes, they're playing tennis.

00:43:35.000 What explains psychologically this contradiction?

00:43:38.000 We keep on revisiting this theme.

00:43:40.000 Again, you're the psychologist here.

00:43:43.000 Explain that to me.

00:43:45.000 The people that do something themselves and then will not prescribe it for others.

00:43:50.000 I think I know the answer, but what is yours?

00:43:51.000 So there's the kind of charitable view, which is that they just don't want to condemn others.

00:43:59.000 They want to seem permissive.

00:44:01.000 They want to seem, whatever, progressive, liberal in their attitudes.

00:44:06.000 The other, I think, more cynical view is that they want to remain lucky.

00:44:14.000 Well, yes, but they also want to undermine competitors, right?

00:44:18.000 And so if I'm dark.

00:44:19.000 Yeah.

00:44:20.000 If I want to work, I'm watching my diet.

00:44:22.000 I'm working out every day.

00:44:23.000 I'm doing all these things for my health, but I'm telling you, like, hey, you know, I haven't got time.

00:44:28.000 Are they consciously doing that?

00:44:29.000 No, I think most of them aren't.

00:44:30.000 Some of them are, but I think most of them are.

00:44:33.000 So explain, what is that psychological phenomenon?

00:44:36.000 This is just a sort of a self-deception pattern here where people will hold a set of views.

00:44:42.000 They don't understand why, but they're beneficial to themselves and to their own lives.

00:44:48.000 And they can take other people out.

00:44:52.000 And that's dark, man.

00:44:54.000 The thing is, so this is a principle of self-deception from evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers.

00:45:00.000 The basic idea here is that if I want to convince you of something, the best way to do it is if I believe it myself, right?

00:45:05.000 Like if I know if I'm consciously and deliberately lying to you, you may be able to tell that I'm being deceitful.

00:45:13.000 But if I believe this myself, then I can also convince you, right?

00:45:16.000 It comes across as much more sincere.

00:45:18.000 And this is why I think most of the time, this is not duplicitous.

00:45:21.000 They've somehow convinced themselves that this is right.

00:45:24.000 And it just happens to benefit them that they hold the set of views that creates advantages for themselves while undermining other people.

00:45:31.000 And you can use this for a lot of things, right?

00:45:33.000 You could apply this to the defund the police idea.

00:45:35.000 You can apply this to body positivity.

00:45:37.000 It's a disaster.

00:45:38.000 The family and marriage stuff.

00:45:40.000 A lot of this is, you know, whether conscious or unconscious, it's undermining those around them.

00:45:47.000 No, that's dark that there's some sort of subconscious, I want to say undiagnosed, but mysterious energy force that they want people to stay at their class so they're going to protect.

00:46:00.000 I mean, is insecurity a good explanation there?

00:46:06.000 The elites are super insecure because they didn't actually earn it and it's not as meritocratic as they'd like to see, which I actually think is true.

00:46:12.000 I don't think it's if you spend a lot of time around our nation's elites, they're incredibly unimpressive people.

00:46:17.000 Yes, yeah.

00:46:18.000 I think that's part of it.

00:46:20.000 There's an element of status anxiety there that they either fear slipping down themselves.

00:46:25.000 And so if they can, you know, if they happen to support a set of views, another one, another luxury belief for you is the elimination of standardized testing requirements for elite universities.

00:46:35.000 Talk about this one, please.

00:46:36.000 This is so important.

00:46:38.000 Well, so a lot of elite universities in the wake of 2020 said, oh, actually standardized testing is racist or it's oppressive.

00:46:45.000 It's, you know, it's not inclusive.

00:46:48.000 And so they eliminated this requirement for admission.

00:46:51.000 And what ended up happening is these institutions received fewer applications from low-income people, from ethnic minorities, from people who, you know, first-generation applicants.

00:47:02.000 And it actually sort of re-entrenched the kind of class divisions across society where they actually got more applications from essentially rich kids who wanted to apply.

00:47:13.000 And so I don't think it's a coincidence that who benefited the most from the elimination of standardized testing.

00:47:18.000 You know, kids from rich families, people who probably are experiencing this insecurity you're describing, the status anxiety.

00:47:26.000 And standardized, you know, because what happens when you remove that component from the application?

00:47:30.000 What are you relying on when you're evaluating candidates?

00:47:32.000 You're relying on things like recommendation letters.

00:47:34.000 You know, if you're a kid from a rich, well-connected family, you can get a senior.

00:47:39.000 You can get a senator, a CEO, a famous Hollywood actor, whatever.

00:47:43.000 And then you're also relying on the essay component.

00:47:46.000 And the essay component is filled with all of the class-coded language of where you spend your summer and how you're spending your free time and the values that you care about.

00:47:56.000 You might remember this from 2017.

00:47:58.000 There was a kid who got into Stanford and you remember that he said one word, one word.

00:48:02.000 Hashtag Black Lives Matter 100 times in a row.

00:48:04.000 What school is it?

00:48:05.000 So he got into Yale and Stanford.

00:48:07.000 I think he ended up going to Yale, actually.

00:48:09.000 And that's all he said the entire essay.

00:48:11.000 I mean, but did Yale ever under criticism for that?

00:48:14.000 For, well, a little bit, but not that much.

00:48:16.000 Not as much as you would have expected.

00:48:19.000 You're reminding of things I'm going to mention on my campus tour.

00:48:21.000 Oh, yeah.

00:48:22.000 Yeah.

00:48:22.000 I mean, that's worth it.

00:48:23.000 I mean, that was a good essay, right?

00:48:25.000 That was the essay.

00:48:26.000 Black Lives Matter 100 Times in a Row. 0.99

00:48:27.000 Hashtag Black Lives Matter.

00:48:28.000 And so that was, you know, and so if you are like no poor working class kid, like even if they did support the movement, they would never even think that that's an essay.

00:48:39.000 That just wouldn't cross their mind.

00:48:41.000 But if you are plugged in and you're connected, you know, oh, this is going to come across as subversive and interesting and dynamic, and it's going to make me stand out in just the right way.

00:48:50.000 And lo and behold, he got in.

00:48:52.000 And so without the standardized test, you're not going to be able to identify talented kids who don't know how to speak in that class context.

00:48:57.000 I think it's a whole other place you and I could take this conversation where it's like this is just the downfall of objective standards and beauty.

00:49:03.000 This just reminds me of like Marcel Duchamp and the entire downfall of art.

00:49:07.000 I mean, if you are even in a place where you can accept an essay, let alone accept that person into the essay.

00:49:13.000 The essay should not have even been read.

00:49:14.000 It should have just been like, you're not allowed that, you're not even allowed in our city.

00:49:19.000 I mean, you're not allowed in Connecticut.

00:49:21.000 Yeah.

00:49:21.000 Okay.

00:49:22.000 But it's just, it's, oh, yeah, I'm going to tape a banana to the wall and I'm like really interesting.

00:49:26.000 Or here's the messy bed and I'm going to call that art or piss Christ or whatever.

00:49:31.000 I mean, it just, it plays into this whole theme and I don't quite know how to articulate it over the last hundred years where now a kid gets goes into Yale just by writing Black Lives Matter on the entire essay.

00:49:41.000 Yes.

00:49:41.000 Yeah.

00:49:42.000 That was his submitted essay.

00:49:43.000 Yep.

00:49:44.000 Yep.

00:49:45.000 Okay.

00:49:45.000 So you have this piece here, the hidden marriage market.

00:49:48.000 Tell us about it.

00:49:49.000 Right.

00:49:50.000 So the point here for the hidden marriage market piece in Substack was that historically, especially for, let's say, the wealthier half of society, there have been arranged marriages, right?

00:50:03.000 Arranged matchmaking.

00:50:04.000 You know, the ruling class in centuries past, a lot of it was about consolidating power and that kind of thing.

00:50:11.000 But then gradually with the rise of the 20th century, the rise of egalitarianism, meritocracy, all these things, at least as ideals, it became, you know, choose your own partner.

00:50:22.000 You know, families became less and less involved.

00:50:25.000 But we ended up recreating this assortative matchmaking system through the university system.

00:50:32.000 And the way that it works, the way that I explain it is, you know, imagine that you are trying to find a romantic partner for your kid and you solicit suitors and you say, okay, well, I want you to submit your IQ scores.

00:50:48.000 I want you to write an essay about the things you care about and your values.

00:50:52.000 I want you to send me some recommendation letters and so on.

00:50:55.000 And you probably see where I'm going with this.

00:50:57.000 That is what universities do.

00:50:58.000 Well, it used to be, but yeah, right, right.

00:51:00.000 They got to marry the Yale kid. 0.98

00:51:02.000 Right.

00:51:03.000 Well, yeah, yeah.

00:51:04.000 So what happens is these universities do this where they're screening all of these people for, you know, before the woke era, they were screening them for academic ability, for family connections, for the things they care about, all this class-coded language, and they bring them into these institutions.

00:51:19.000 And now you're surrounded by people who are roughly the same level of ability, interests, you're all these young people.

00:51:27.000 And the way that assortive mating works is that the vast majority of people who have bachelor's degrees marry other people with bachelor's degrees or higher.

00:51:37.000 And this is, you know, this is what's known formally as assortative mating, that people tend to marry people who are similar to themselves.

00:51:45.000 This birds of a feather flock together idea.

00:51:47.000 Very rarely do you marry down in class.

00:51:50.000 Right.

00:51:50.000 Yeah.

00:51:50.000 people tend to marry across um and so that is what what i call the hidden marriage market is it's it's higher education where once you pass through the and even if you don't marry a classmate a fellow student um your dating pool changes dramatically once you pass through these institutions and so from that point on you're surrounded by people who work white collar occupations people who are speak your language yeah speak your language exactly and

00:52:19.000 is this a good thing it's i don't think it's good or bad um it's it's the way that historically things have always been um i don't think that you would ever be able to change this pattern without some kind of authoritarian overreach that people just tend to like being around people similar to themselves it's not just education and income um and class it's also uh one of the strongest um uh similarities between people in a couple is their political values

00:52:49.000 that people uh like to be with others who share their political orientation and so the the strongest predictors uh tend to be a level of education slash social class and then religiosity and political orientation people like people like themselves why are marriage rates going down it's a good question um they might be going back up last six months i don't know because everything's changing a little bit but last 10 years why are they going down i think there are a couple of different reasons here so a lot of people when they talk about uh the decline of marriage rates they're focusing on

00:53:18.000 on elites right like people who are uh uh concentrated in metropolitan areas who go to college who and you oh well you know women are going to they're extending their education they're prolonging their time in higher education and they're delaying marriage and delaying fertility actually what you're seeing is um most of the decline in marriage can be accounted for by poor and working class people that's where marriage rates are shockingly low now um why well i think it

00:53:48.000 comes down to uh to values so if you are in a culture that valorizes marriage and commitment um people are going to get married and if you're in a culture where marriage is just one option among many and the elites in your society will often denigrate marriage or mock it or uh or you know treat it as uh this kind of uh trivial unimportant thing fewer people are going to get married especially people who who rely on public

00:54:18.000 messaging or are you you on.

00:54:19.000 on ideas that they hear from elites.

00:54:22.000 You know, when I talk about my books, sometimes I'll go to campuses and stuff, and I'll do by way of analogy the way that I grew up.

00:54:29.000 Imagine that you're a kid in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, safe neighborhood, your parents are married, all the adults in your environment are married.

00:54:37.000 And this is more or less the typical environment for a kid like that.

00:54:42.000 You're surrounded by married adults, and then you turn on TV, you look at elite magazines, newspapers, glossy periodicals.

00:54:53.000 And so, in your real life, you're seeing responsible adults who are getting married.

00:54:56.000 But in pop culture and in a lot of the messaging, you're seeing, oh, casual sex is fun, be promiscuous, have a good time.

00:55:03.000 Marriage isn't important.

00:55:04.000 Maybe you should try living in a polycule.

00:55:07.000 What is that?

00:55:09.000 It's such like a polyamorous kind of arrangement.

00:55:11.000 And so you have these two things, right?

00:55:13.000 But the messaging that you're seeing on the screens and in pop culture is counterbalanced by what you're seeing in your real life.

00:55:20.000 And so you have real role models and examples.

00:55:22.000 But now imagine that you're a kid who grew up the way that me and my friends did in an environment where you aren't seeing married adults.

00:55:29.000 You're seeing a lot of single parents or kids raised by grandparents, kids in foster homes.

00:55:33.000 And then you turn on the TV, you turn on social media, pop culture, all this kind of elite media, and you're seeing the opposite.

00:55:41.000 You're seeing casual sex, promiscuity, polyamory, all this stuff.

00:55:45.000 That's not counterbalanced by anything, right?

00:55:47.000 Like you're not going to get married if you're not getting that message from anywhere.

00:55:51.000 And so I think, yes, for the wealthier half of society, some of it does have to do with increasingly prolonged education and people living in these cities and a lot of this sort of ambition and status chasing and that kind of thing.

00:56:03.000 But I think for the lower half of society where marriage rates have really collapsed, it's due to the lack of values.

00:56:11.000 We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries.

00:56:13.000 And today, I want to point you to their podcast.

00:56:16.000 It's called Culture in Christianity: the Allen Jackson Podcast.

00:56:20.000 What makes it unique is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective.

00:56:23.000 He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today: gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge, Trump in the White House, issues in the church.

00:56:32.000 He doesn't just discuss the problems.

00:56:34.000 In every episode, he gives practical things we can do to make a difference.

00:56:37.000 His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies.

00:56:41.000 They've been great friends.

00:56:42.000 And now you can hear from Charlie in his own words.

00:56:44.000 Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world today.

00:56:50.000 The Culture and Christianity podcast is informative and encouraging.

00:56:54.000 You could find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:56:57.000 Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes.

00:57:00.000 Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring biblical truth back into our culture.

00:57:05.000 You can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry at alanjackson.com forward slash Charlie.

00:57:13.000 And this is now this other piece we have here.

00:57:16.000 To raise birth rates, pay people to get married. 0.77

00:57:19.000 What kind of crazy fascist idea is this?

00:57:22.000 You know, well, is it so crazy, Charlie?

00:57:25.000 I'm being facetious.

00:57:26.000 I like it.

00:57:26.000 So I'm sure you've seen a lot of governments have attempted to raise the birth rate by paying people to have kids, right?

00:57:35.000 In Hungary, that is the most successful example.

00:57:39.000 And even then, it's been met with limited success.

00:57:42.000 So they managed to get a lot of money.

00:57:43.000 It's a modest uptick, is what I'm told.

00:57:44.000 Something like 1.6, 1.7, right?

00:57:46.000 Something like that.

00:57:48.000 So pre- and post-payment, you know, cash payment transfer to parents, it raised the birth rate something about like 0.3.

00:57:54.000 So you're getting like an extra third of a kid per couple or something like that.

00:57:57.000 That's something.

00:57:58.000 Yeah, it's not nothing.

00:58:00.000 But I think what's happening is you're kind of throwing out, or you're rather, you're skipping a step here because even in our day and age, despite all the luxury beliefs, despite all of this kind of stuff we're seeing, if you ask most people, you know, do you want to get married before you have kids?

00:58:15.000 Even today, most people say yes.

00:58:16.000 They'd like to have a partner to raise their kid with.

00:58:19.000 And so when you pay people to have kids, well, it's like, well, most people aren't getting married.

00:58:24.000 And so first you need to get married first, and then you have kids.

00:58:26.000 And what's interesting is when we look at the fertility decline, there was an interesting analysis published by The Economist last year, which found that what's mostly responsible for the decline in fertility is poor and working class women having fewer children.

00:58:42.000 So if you look at college-educated women, the decline in fertility is noticeable, but it's very slight compared to 30 years ago. 0.96

00:58:49.000 They are having fewer kids, but it's a very small dip.

00:58:53.000 But the bulk of the decline in fertility is among poor and working class women. 0.97

00:58:57.000 And that's because, as we were just discussing, marriage rates have declined.

00:59:02.000 So pay these women, pay these men, get married first. 1.00

00:59:06.000 And then once they're in a partnership, and once you incentivize them to find a partner that they like being around, make it a priority, give them money for it, they're just naturally going to have kids because that's kind of the life course.

00:59:17.000 Once you find a partner, most people at that point decide to have kids anyway.

00:59:22.000 But I think the reason for that fertility decline, again, it comes down to values, it comes down to culture.

00:59:27.000 So you think fertility rates are tied to marriage rates?

00:59:30.000 Right.

00:59:30.000 I think the low fertility rates are downstream of the decline in marriage rates.

00:59:33.000 Yeah, why does everyone skip that step?

00:59:35.000 You're like the first one I've heard to say that.

00:59:38.000 Well, again, I think a marriage is unfashionable.

00:59:40.000 It's unpopular.

00:59:42.000 It's this, you know, people don't want to feel judgmental and they want to feel, oh, you know, if you've got a theme throughout our conversation.

00:59:49.000 Yeah.

00:59:50.000 I mean, it's a luxury belief that marriage is just one choice among many.

00:59:54.000 Yeah, they don't believe that.

00:59:56.000 Yeah.

00:59:56.000 They just say it.

00:59:57.000 So, but why does it matter for us to reverse the fertility crisis?

01:00:01.000 That's a good question.

01:00:03.000 And yeah, Elon Musk and others have pointed this out.

01:00:05.000 It seems self-evident, but why does it matter?

01:00:08.000 Yeah.

01:00:09.000 Well, I think there are some people who actually don't care about it.

01:00:12.000 So what's interesting is.

01:00:13.000 No, I know I get that question all the time on campus.

01:00:15.000 They reject the premise.

01:00:16.000 Well, if you look at the people who are what are known as anti-natalists, people who believe you shouldn't have kids, there was an interesting study a couple of years ago which found that one of the strongest predictors of anti-natalist attitudes is high scores on what are known as the dark triad personality traits.

01:00:33.000 That's one of the things I want to talk about.

01:00:34.000 What is that?

01:00:35.000 So the dark triad, it's an interesting framework from personality psychology.

01:00:41.000 And it's a constellation of traits, narcissism, which is feelings of entitled self-importance.

01:00:48.000 Resentment, right?

01:00:50.000 There's some resentment among narcissists.

01:00:52.000 No, it's one of the other ones.

01:00:53.000 I'm trying to remember.

01:00:54.000 So the second one is psychopathy.

01:00:56.000 Okay.

01:00:57.000 And psychopathy is callousness, cynicism, disregard for other people.

01:01:02.000 And then the third trait for the dark triad is Machiavellianism, which is kind of strategic exploitation and duplicity.

01:01:10.000 And if you score high on these three traits, you're more likely to believe that it's wrong to have kids.

01:01:16.000 You're more likely to express this view that people shouldn't have kids.

01:01:20.000 And sometimes I wonder if this is what's sometimes known as a sort of like a mating interference strategy or a reproductive interference strategy.

01:01:28.000 So this is from whom.

01:01:30.000 So this is what this is.

01:01:31.000 Metaphysically, I have an answer, but you know.

01:01:33.000 Well, so I'm drawing here from ideas in kind of animal research, evolutionary psychology, and this kind of stuff.

01:01:41.000 And essentially, it's, you know, if I goes back to our earlier point here, where if I can convince you not to have kids, if I'm a dark triad person, I'm a scheming, manipulative, self-entitled person.

01:01:51.000 Oh, I know the type.

01:01:52.000 Yeah, yeah, I've met a few of them too.

01:01:54.000 If I can convince you not to have kids, then I'm putting myself in a better position for my kids to succeed.

01:01:59.000 What are the psychological markers of someone that has a dark triad?

01:02:02.000 How do you quickly diagnose that?

01:02:04.000 So it's not necessarily a clinically diagnosable person.

01:02:08.000 How do I notice it, recognize it?

01:02:09.000 Because I think it's helpful.

01:02:10.000 People should know that in their work, in their community.

01:02:13.000 Yeah, there are it's hard to accurately sort of sort of diagnose at a glance whether someone is dark tribe.

01:02:19.000 But once you get to speak with someone, get to know them, if you speak with someone who regularly turns the conversation around back to themselves, kind of one-uppers, you tell an interesting story, let me tell you something about what happened to me today, and then I come back with, oh, that's nothing.

01:02:33.000 Like, let me tell you about what happened to me.

01:02:34.000 That's a marker of something like narcissism.

01:02:38.000 Great point.

01:02:38.000 If you see someone who is what's called known as itinerant, so very frequently relocates in their lives, that can also be a sign of psychopathy because this is someone who regularly burns bridges, whether with their employer, with their friends, with their romantic partners.

01:02:56.000 So when people have a pattern of anyone being close to them and it's bad, that's a bad sign.

01:03:02.000 Right.

01:03:02.000 And then another, and this is more characteristic of Machiavellianism, is if you ask other people about them and you get a wide variety of different views.

01:03:11.000 So, you know, if I ask you, hey, what's the deal with this guy?

01:03:14.000 You give me one opinion.

01:03:15.000 I ask someone else, what's the deal with this guy?

01:03:17.000 They give me a completely different perception.

01:03:20.000 Then what that tells me is this person is kind of a snake, a shapeshifter, someone who behaves differently in different contexts.

01:03:26.000 And so that can be important as well.

01:03:28.000 It's not just, let me look at this person and try to evaluate them.

01:03:30.000 Let me ask around.

01:03:31.000 And this is why referrals and recommendations and that kind of thing.

01:03:35.000 And so back to the birth rate, you're saying that the dark triad is an interference project.

01:03:40.000 That's what I suspect is if you are high on these traits, if you're kind of a manipulative person, you're going to promote antinatalism as an idea in part because you want to reduce other people's fertility, reduce the competition.

01:03:57.000 The other thing is people who are high on the dark triad tend to be unhappy people in general.

01:04:02.000 And I think they just want to kind of.

01:04:04.000 What percentage of the population is high in the dark triad? 0.71

01:04:07.000 So it varies.

01:04:09.000 It depends on how you sort of cut it, where's the cutoff here, but something like 5% are high on this.

01:04:15.000 That's a lot.

01:04:16.000 Yeah.

01:04:16.000 And then perhaps another 5% sort of right beneath them who are not sort of overtly manipulative or scary in some way, but they're sort of.

01:04:25.000 What percentage of prisoners are dark triad people?

01:04:28.000 So that one I don't know, but I do know that when you just measure psychopathy, that is the lack of empathy or lack of compassion.

01:04:38.000 Callousness, cruel disregard for others.

01:04:42.000 It's sometimes known as the darkest of the dark triad of the high correlation of prison populations.

01:04:49.000 So something like 40% of prison inmates would qualify as clinical psychopaths, right?

01:04:55.000 And so you see the most concentration of psychopaths in prison.

01:05:00.000 But what's interesting is that you also find large numbers of psychopaths in sort of corporate boardrooms, probably yes, high-ranking politicians, something like 12% to 15% of the people who are at or near the top of their game in terms of business, corporations, politics, around 12 to 15%.

01:05:25.000 And then among college students, it's something like 8 to 10% of college students would qualify for a psychopathy diagnosis.

01:05:33.000 Well, I've met a lot of them.

01:05:35.000 And so just as a reference point, something like 1 to 2% of the population would qualify as a clinically diagnosable psychopath.

01:05:44.000 So it's 1 to 2% of the general population, something like 10% on college campuses, 12% to 15% among high achievers, and then something like 30% to 40% in prisons.

01:05:54.000 And so how does that then play itself out in society?

01:05:57.000 And what are the checks we have on psychopathic people?

01:06:00.000 Well, so one is basically being able to screen for people who are being purposefully manipulative to extract some gain.

01:06:09.000 So there was a study a couple of years ago on what's called victim signaling, which is essentially this paper found that people who are high on the dark triad traits are more likely to signal victimhood in order to obtain advantages for themselves.

01:06:24.000 And so people who are high on these traits are more likely to say, you know, I'm not.

01:06:28.000 I'm under attack.

01:06:29.000 Yeah, yeah, I'm under attack.

01:06:30.000 They like to broadcast how they're being mistreated and beleaguered and so on.

01:06:35.000 And I think it is important here to note that it's not that victims have high dark triads.

01:06:40.000 No, no, no, that's right.

01:06:40.000 Actual victims.

01:06:41.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:06:42.000 Rather, it's people who are high on the dark triad disguise themselves as victims in order to exploit your sympathy, your compassion, your empathy.

01:06:50.000 That, you know, oh, I know you're a good person.

01:06:52.000 And, well, because I know you're a good person, I'm going to try to position myself in a way to elicit your sympathy and talk about how bad I've had it and so on.

01:07:01.000 And historically, we've found ways to screen for that where we have kind of high standards for, okay, well, you've been mistreated.

01:07:07.000 Well, explain it.

01:07:08.000 You know, we're able to challenge you on it a little bit just to make sure before we devote attention and time and resources to you, like, let's actually evaluate.

01:07:15.000 We don't do anything more because we can't judge.

01:07:16.000 Everyone's a victim and we're not allowed to challenge it in any way, right?

01:07:19.000 And of course, like dark triad people pick up on this and they're like, oh, well, how do I, yeah, they arrive at a new environment and say, well, what can I do to obtain advantages for myself? 1.00

01:07:29.000 Oh, well, I'll just pretend like I'm a victim and so there you have it.

01:07:33.000 So what you're pinpointing is that the modern so smart.

01:07:37.000 I've never heard anybody say this and I listen and read a lot of stuff.

01:07:40.000 What you're saying, though, is that this modern sensitivity movement, last 20, 30 years, can't judge, you know, can't make people feel bad, is a fertile playground for psychopaths.

01:07:51.000 That's right.

01:07:52.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:07:53.000 Have you written this down?

01:07:54.000 Yeah, I have.

01:07:55.000 I'll send it to you.

01:07:56.000 It's exploiting.

01:07:56.000 No, that's really good.

01:07:57.000 Because I deal with psychopaths way too often because it's in my world of power, intrigue, politics, and media.

01:08:05.000 Yeah.

01:08:06.000 Well, they're also narcissists.

01:08:07.000 Yeah.

01:08:07.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:08:08.000 I mean, and people who tend to be interested in these, it disproportionately attracts those types of people.

01:08:13.000 If there's a camera, there's a narcissist. 0.83

01:08:15.000 Yeah, I mean, well, I wouldn't go that way, but I would say that if there's a camera, you're more likely to attract.

01:08:20.000 No, that's what I'm saying.

01:08:21.000 Not everyone on camera is a narcissist.

01:08:24.000 But talk more about that.

01:08:25.000 So the check used to be our capacity to ask questions, pursue inquiry, and kind of push back and de-emphasize.

01:08:37.000 But now we can't do that because the modern morality is thou shall not judge under any circumstances.

01:08:43.000 You're automatically a victim, period.

01:08:45.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:08:46.000 And therefore now you get the rise of the psychopaths.

01:08:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:49.000 Well, they're able to exploit other people's sympathy.

01:08:51.000 If you have, this is kind of a game, you could look at it through a game theory lens where if everyone is cooperating, things can work pretty well.

01:08:57.000 But as soon as you have someone who's a defector, an exploiter, they can take advantage of all of the cooperators and they can quickly rise to the top because no one's challenging them, no one's checking them.

01:09:06.000 And I think we're seeing a lot of that.

01:09:09.000 But what's interesting is that people who are high on the dark triad, they tend to be short-term effective, long-term ineffective because they can.

01:09:14.000 That's why they have to bounce around.

01:09:15.000 Yes, that's why they move a lot.

01:09:16.000 And it's difficult for them to build durable coalitions, to acquire trust from people.

01:09:21.000 If you want to build something that lasts and hold on to power, not just momentarily, but for a prolonged period of time, people have to trust you.

01:09:29.000 And narcissistic psychopaths.

01:09:31.000 If you were up against a dark triad person, what else is their Achilles heel? 1.00

01:09:36.000 I mean, generally, I would recommend trying to avoid them.

01:09:40.000 But yeah, each person is different, right?

01:09:43.000 Like they're different just like anyone who isn't high on the triad.

01:09:47.000 What you're saying is like, I'm just blown away by the specificity.

01:09:51.000 I mean, it's useful to ask them, you know, to challenge them because a lot of them, just like other people, but perhaps even more so for narcissistic types, is they have a very sort of surface level knowledge of whatever they're talking about.

01:09:51.000 Yeah.

01:10:02.000 They know just enough to sound impressive.

01:10:04.000 And then, once you start challenging them and questioning them and so on, you'll see that oftentimes they will start to fall apart.

01:10:11.000 And then they'll start to resort to these kinds of manipulative tactics of, you know, what is it, like sort of reorienting and interrogating you instead of calling you all kinds of names, accusing you of whatever ism of the day and that kind of thing.

01:10:25.000 And I think that oftentimes you can kind of declare victory at that point where once you've stepped outside of the argument and started lobbying names, then you know that.

01:10:33.000 And wokeism is just like the perfect launching off point for the dark triad.

01:10:39.000 Yeah.

01:10:39.000 Because you can't have any dialogue or discourse.

01:10:41.000 It's all about victim sensitivity and oppression hierarchy. 0.96

01:10:46.000 And so you can't really navigate it.

01:10:48.000 So there's no way for us to keep the psychopaths in their corner.

01:10:52.000 Instead, they're able to grow and flourish, especially if they are of a victim group criteria.

01:10:57.000 Right.

01:10:57.000 And yeah, and this, yeah, it's a catastrophic ideology for that reason, where you start to put people who are unqualified into positions of power because we can't stop them because you're a racist.

01:11:08.000 So if you have like a black female psychopath who's competing against you and is lying and is narcissistic and is Machiavellian, if you report her to HR, you could get in trouble for being a racist. 0.99

01:11:20.000 Yes.

01:11:21.000 And then she would use, or I don't mean to pick on black women, whatever BIPOC thing. 1.00

01:11:26.000 They could use the HR department as a means towards their ascension.

01:11:31.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:11:31.000 Yeah.

01:11:32.000 And they tend to be good at that, of sort of identifying weak spots and learning how to disguise themselves in just the right way.

01:11:40.000 And yeah, we used to have sort of checks on this: it's good to have compassion for people who are genuinely victims and try to give them a leg up whenever you can.

01:11:49.000 But in order to ensure that that doesn't get exploited, you have to be able to question people, to interrogate them, to make sure that their claims to victimhood are valid.

01:12:00.000 And often what you find is that people who claim to be victims are the least likely to actually be victimized or the most able to accentuate whatever qualities they share with actual victims.

01:12:14.000 And so you saw this with a lot of the elite college admissions policies, right?

01:12:23.000 They kind of valorize victimhood and this kind of thing.

01:12:26.000 And if you want to get in, then you have to talk about how you've been oppressed in some way.

01:12:31.000 But ironically, the people who are the best at speaking the language of oppression are the ones who have been the least oppressed because if you've actually been oppressed, you don't know the class-coded language.

01:12:39.000 Well, that's a phenomenal segue to our last thing, which is your book.

01:12:43.000 So you've lived a tough life, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class.

01:12:43.000 Oh, sure.

01:12:49.000 You didn't quite know how to explain it in elite parlance, right?

01:12:53.000 Right.

01:12:53.000 Tell us about your story.

01:12:55.000 I mean, you're incredibly accomplished.

01:12:56.000 You have this great book, Troubled.

01:12:57.000 Please.

01:12:58.000 Yeah, well, I open the preface of Troubled by introducing myself to the reader by my three names.

01:13:06.000 So my full name is Robert Kim Henderson.

01:13:10.000 My first name, Robert, comes from my biological father, whom I've never met.

01:13:15.000 And the only reason I have isn't to this day, right?

01:13:17.000 Yeah.

01:13:18.000 The only reason I have his name, not really, if I'm going to be honest.

01:13:23.000 You know, I got his name from.

01:13:24.000 It's a tough question, so I'm sorry.

01:13:26.000 Yeah, well, no, it's not.

01:13:27.000 It's just, I've thought about that, and I kind of go back and forth.

01:13:30.000 I'm kind of ambivalent on it.

01:13:32.000 But my middle name, Kim, comes from my biological mother.

01:13:36.000 So she came to the U.S. from Seoul, from South Korea as a young woman.

01:13:40.000 And her life quickly unraveled.

01:13:42.000 And I talk a little bit about it in the book, got swept up in drugs and a lot of the kind of stuff that's going on.

01:13:47.000 I know her.

01:13:48.000 Very briefly, I have a couple of early memories which I describe in the book.

01:13:52.000 She was strung out.

01:13:55.000 That's when I was taken by social workers and placed into the LA County foster system, bounced around different homes.

01:14:03.000 And then this is where my last name comes from, Henderson, which comes from my adoptive family.

01:14:09.000 And this was the late 90s.

01:14:11.000 My adoptive family, we settled in this dusty blue-collar town called Red Bluff in California.

01:14:18.000 Very working-class town.

01:14:19.000 I checked the stats for my county.

01:14:22.000 It's one of the poorest counties in California.

01:14:24.000 And in the 2024 election, it went 70% for Trump.

01:14:27.000 Wow.

01:14:27.000 Very Republican.

01:14:28.000 It's a part of California people do not really know about.

01:14:31.000 It's way, way north.

01:14:33.000 It's known as the state of Jefferson.

01:14:34.000 It's more libertarian, but in terms of voting patterns, Republican.

01:14:38.000 And most of the adults didn't have college degrees.

01:14:41.000 There was a lot of squalor.

01:14:43.000 The opioid crisis was just kicking off.

01:14:45.000 A lot of meth.

01:14:46.000 My adoptive parents divorced.

01:14:47.000 There was a lot of drama.

01:14:49.000 My adoptive parents divorced.

01:14:50.000 My adoptive parents divorced.

01:14:51.000 Yeah.

01:14:52.000 And do you have any siblings?

01:14:54.000 So they had a biological daughter who's my adoptive sister.

01:14:57.000 Was that a good relationship?

01:14:59.000 Yeah.

01:14:59.000 It was good.

01:14:59.000 Yeah.

01:14:59.000 That's, you know, she and I are, we remain close.

01:15:03.000 Praise God for that.

01:15:03.000 Yeah.

01:15:05.000 She was a good, good influence for me.

01:15:07.000 And then later, when I was writing the book, I decided to take a genetic ancestry test because I'd never known anything about my father, but I thought, oh, maybe it'll be interesting for the book.

01:15:16.000 And I discovered that I'm half Hispanic on my father's side.

01:15:20.000 So my father was Mexican.

01:15:22.000 And I remember when I got those results, my first thought was, I wish I'd known that when I was applying to college.

01:15:28.000 Yeah.

01:15:31.000 I mean, if you went to Yale and Cambridge, you did just fine.

01:15:36.000 But before you get the letters, you never know, right?

01:15:38.000 You want all the women. 0.82

01:15:39.000 And you would have been able to check the Hispanic box. 0.51

01:15:41.000 Yeah.

01:15:42.000 Unstoppable.

01:15:43.000 I mean, you would have been president of the university.

01:15:44.000 Yeah, maybe.

01:15:45.000 You would have the Hispanic Asian foster care thing going.

01:15:48.000 I know, I know.

01:15:49.000 But yeah, and so I document not just my life in the book, but some of my friends as well that I grew up around in this very, very tough, poor, impoverished, lot of crime, a lot of violence, a lot of drugs, and how their lives, when I had five close friends growing up in high school, two friends went to prison.

01:16:10.000 I had another friend who was shot to death.

01:16:13.000 Other friends kind of working menial blue-collar jobs.

01:16:16.000 And they're struggling.

01:16:17.000 I go back every couple of years to visit.

01:16:19.000 And I thought it was important to tell their stories as well.

01:16:25.000 So what drove you when you were like 14?

01:16:27.000 Because that's a decision-making time.

01:16:29.000 14.

01:16:30.000 Well, 14, 15.

01:16:31.000 I'm sure you talk about this in the book.

01:16:32.000 Yeah.

01:16:33.000 And how did you end up at Yale?

01:16:35.000 Well, so when I was 14, God, you know, there's so much in the book, but I'll just my I mentioned my adoptive parents divorced and my adoptive father stopped speaking with me.

01:16:49.000 So I was raised for a period with my adoptive mother.

01:16:52.000 She's a single mom, and she ended up in a relationship with a woman named Shelly in the book.

01:17:00.000 Yeah, right.

01:17:00.000 California.

01:17:01.000 Actually, yeah.

01:17:02.000 And so then they raised me for a period of my childhood.

01:17:06.000 Raised by lesbians, too. 0.95

01:17:08.000 Not for the whole, but yes.

01:17:09.000 You've really run the gauntlet.

01:17:11.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:17:12.000 I am impressed.

01:17:13.000 Yeah, can't make that up.

01:17:15.000 No, you can't make that up, right?

01:17:16.000 Foster parents from Korea and Mexico raised by lesbians. 0.99

01:17:20.000 It's impressive.

01:17:21.000 Well, this next part, so when I was 14, right before high school, so my mom and Shelly were together at this time, and Shelly was shot.

01:17:31.000 And so what was driving me at that point was some combination of rage and disappointment and hurt.

01:17:37.000 And there was a lot going on.

01:17:39.000 Who were you angry at?

01:17:41.000 It was kind of a diffuse, like I think it was accumulated anger from not ever knowing my father, all the foster homes, all of the, you know, I have the line in the book where I say, if you, if a kid is let down by the adults in his life, eventually he learns to let himself down.

01:18:01.000 And that's what I was feeling.

01:18:02.000 Just this massive disappointment, let down, and it got channeled as rage, acting out.

01:18:10.000 And this is one reason, among others, why I didn't go straight to college after high school, because I was so unfocused.

01:18:17.000 I graduated with a 2.2 GPA.

01:18:20.000 How did you get to Yale then?

01:18:22.000 So I enlisted.

01:18:23.000 So I was 17, enlisted in the Air Force.

01:18:26.000 That must have been great for you.

01:18:27.000 It was.

01:18:28.000 Yeah.

01:18:28.000 It was, you know, that was, to this day, probably the best decision I ever made.

01:18:33.000 Because that gave you order and discipline, direction, purpose.

01:18:37.000 And the whole, you know, so much of the book, that's a theme that runs through is the importance of order.

01:18:43.000 You know, I mentioned one of my friends went to prison.

01:18:46.000 After he got out, I met up with him.

01:18:48.000 We were both 19, 20 years old.

01:18:50.000 And we were comparing notes.

01:18:51.000 He's like, you know, what was basic training like?

01:18:53.000 What's the military like?

01:18:53.000 What's this?

01:18:54.000 And I'm like, you know, what's prison like?

01:18:55.000 What was that?

01:18:56.000 And we both kind of came to this same conclusion where it kind of sucks, but we also liked it.

01:19:01.000 He was telling me he liked prison because he knew you get up at this time, you go to roll call, you do need order.

01:19:06.000 Yeah.

01:19:07.000 And he was like, I kind of missed that.

01:19:08.000 And I was thinking to myself, yeah, like in the moment it sucks.

01:19:11.000 But then as you go on, you're like, oh, this is what I need.

01:19:14.000 I need to know what my day is going to look like, what my week's going to look like, what's expected of me, what my goals are, and how to use this time productively.

01:19:21.000 And so from that point, I started going to night classes at a community college, finally took the SAT, which I never did in high school.

01:19:28.000 And then, you know, to their credit, Yale ended up admitting me.

01:19:33.000 And this was 2015.

01:19:36.000 So it was right at the moment that the university started to go crazy.

01:19:39.000 So I got a front receipt to that.

01:19:41.000 And then when did you do your doctorate in psychology?

01:19:45.000 So I went off to Cambridge in 2018.

01:19:49.000 And one reason, Charlie, why I went to Cambridge is because I thought, because I was witnessing all the craziness.

01:19:54.000 You thought Cambridge must be, I mean, come on, it's Cambridge.

01:19:56.000 Yeah, I was like, oh, like, it's in England.

01:19:58.000 I had this image in my mind of like these like these dons in the white robes or black robes rather, just like disconnected from the culture war. 0.99

01:20:07.000 They're reading like very monastic.

01:20:09.000 Yeah, yeah, like with sort of sort of oak wood paneling and old libraries and just no, that's not what Cambridge is like.

01:20:17.000 So I get there within, I think, six months.

01:20:19.000 So Jordan Peterson was supposed to be a guest research fellow at the University of Cambridge.

01:20:23.000 So this is 2019.

01:20:24.000 I remember this.

01:20:25.000 He's disinvited.

01:20:26.000 He's like Queens or something or Kings or one of their colleges.

01:20:28.000 Yeah, it was one of the colleges.

01:20:29.000 There's one of the colleges.

01:20:30.000 In the Divinity School, but I don't remember which college.

01:20:32.000 Yeah, I could be misremembering, but yeah.

01:20:33.000 But yeah, he, and he was disinvited.

01:20:36.000 And I'm like, oh, this same stuff is happening here, too.

01:20:41.000 And I saw lower level examples.

01:20:43.000 That was the most sort of salient, sort of media example, but there were lower-level cases.

01:20:48.000 I had friends who were fired, friends pressured to resign, all this crazy stuff happening.

01:20:52.000 And I thought I wanted to be a professor.

01:20:55.000 And then I see all of this stuff happening.

01:20:57.000 And I'm like, I can't, I can't be in academia.

01:20:59.000 I'm seeing too much of this.

01:21:00.000 And then I started to write full-time.

01:21:02.000 I worked on this book.

01:21:03.000 I started a sub stack and kind of pivoted out of academia and more towards sort of commentary and writing for the general public.

01:21:10.000 And yeah, it was just a shame.

01:21:12.000 I had this image of what college was, mostly mistaken, also kind of a class thing because I based my perception of college on TV and movies.

01:21:21.000 I'm like, oh, you go there, you read books, maybe you go to a party, you have a good time, you read, you study, you come out better.

01:21:26.000 And then I get there and it's just demonstrations and mad activism and anger.

01:21:32.000 And I got there, you know, again, 2015, I saw all the blow-ups during that year.

01:21:37.000 And then 2016, Trump gets elected.

01:21:39.000 People go to another level of craziness.

01:21:41.000 And I go off to England, same thing.

01:21:43.000 And I'm like, nope, I can't.

01:21:44.000 I can't do this.

01:21:45.000 Good for you.

01:21:46.000 What an amazing success story.

01:21:47.000 The book is called Troubled, A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.

01:21:52.000 I should call you Dr. Henderson, but I should.

01:21:55.000 But thank you for your time.

01:21:56.000 This was wonderful.

01:21:57.000 Come back anytime.

01:21:58.000 Thanks for watching.

The Charlie Kirk Show - November 02, 2025

Charlie's Last Long-Form Interview: Luxury Beliefs with Rob Henderson

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