The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 429. The Psychology of Social Status and Class ｜ Rob Henderson

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody. I'm talking today to Dr. Rob Henderson, who's a novelist and a public intellectual, a psychologist,

00:01:17.600 and author of the recent book, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class, which was released in February.

00:01:26.940 And we really talk about not so much his book exactly, although also that, but Rob's experience growing up in the foster care system in the United States, in California,

00:01:38.600 and his transformation, sequential transformations of personality and status as he moved from the foster care system,

00:01:48.740 very fragmented and chaotic childhood upbringing, into the military, and then to Yale and to Cambridge.

00:01:56.900 And so quite an upward arc on the academic and intellectual side.

00:02:02.220 And we review his book, the autobiography that's laid out in this book, talking about his early experiences and concentrating as well on his developing ideas of family fragmentation

00:02:15.100 and the manner in which that fragmentation has been aided and abetted by the same elites, essentially, that Rob studied with at Yale and perhaps to a lesser degree at Cambridge.

00:02:27.100 And so he's the originator of the notion of luxury beliefs, right?

00:02:31.300 The idea that the elite classes who are yammering constantly about privilege have, as one of the privileges they're unwilling to discuss,

00:02:42.720 the privilege of adopting ideas that are very, very harmful to dispossessed people, especially those who are economically dispossessed.

00:02:52.100 They have these ideas of unstable family structure, for example, that when implemented in the real world are absolutely catastrophic.

00:03:00.580 And so we talk about that too.

00:03:03.240 And so join us for that.

00:03:06.200 So I just reread your book, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family and social class last week.

00:03:12.680 And I found some topics that I'd really like to zero in on.

00:03:17.240 But the first thing I'd like to know is, when exactly was your book published and how is it doing?

00:03:23.760 It was published February 20th.

00:03:26.120 So as of this conversation, just a few days ago, I think it's doing well.

00:03:30.660 It seems to be well received.

00:03:32.760 A lot of my Substack subscribers are leaving positive feedback on Goodreads and on Amazon.

00:03:39.040 And it's been reviewed in various outlets.

00:03:43.640 And so far, I've been really pleased with how things have developed.

00:03:47.700 I hit some strange obstacles on the way.

00:03:51.060 Initially, my publisher and I thought we'd do some kind of a mini book tour, maybe visit some bookstores, do some book signings.

00:03:58.240 And that ended up not going through, which was really disappointing for me.

00:04:02.560 But fortunately, others have stepped into the breach, and we've been able to do some events outside of the bookstore promo circuit.

00:04:10.140 But so far, I've been very pleased.

00:04:12.040 Okay.

00:04:12.440 So that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because I saw some allusion to that probably on X.

00:04:19.620 So why have you been unable to arrange a standard book tour in bookshops?

00:04:27.800 I mean, you'd assume that, you know, bookshops would want to sell books, since that's what they do.

00:04:35.720 And, you know, I ran into trouble with booksellers with my books because they would, well, they certainly didn't promote them, and they often hid them.

00:04:44.080 And that was particularly true in Canada.

00:04:46.300 Now, what effect that had is hard to say.

00:04:49.460 It might have had a positive effect, all things considered, because it was publicized.

00:04:52.960 But still, to call it appalling is to say almost nothing.

00:04:56.680 It's this kind of underground shadow banning that seems to be a characteristic of our age.

00:05:03.520 Okay, so what exactly happened to you?

00:05:05.660 And how do you explain it?

00:05:07.600 Because, you know, you'd think that your book, if your book would have been published in the 60s, it would have been something like a clarion call to the left.

00:05:20.020 Right, because you grew up under restricted circumstances, to say the least.

00:05:26.760 And it's a tale of you prevailing despite that.

00:05:30.460 It isn't the sort of book that you would think would attract censorship attention.

00:05:38.960 Like, you're not the guy to attract that attention fundamentally.

00:05:42.140 So why don't you walk me through that?

00:05:43.680 Tell me what you make of it.

00:05:45.220 Yeah, it was a surprise to me.

00:05:46.840 I didn't think that my book was particularly controversial.

00:05:50.380 But perhaps my sense of these things, you know, I don't know how much it can be trusted.

00:05:56.600 Because the line is always moving constantly as far as what's acceptable versus unacceptable and the line around political correctness and so forth.

00:06:03.920 But I think the message in my book was perhaps to some degree unfashionable.

00:06:08.080 I write in the book about the importance of responsibility, taking control of your life.

00:06:14.380 In the later chapters of the book, I discuss some of the phenomena around elite universities, the self-inflicted controversies at Yale and some of the other Ivy League schools.

00:06:25.420 I describe luxury beliefs and point out some of the hypocrisy of the elites.

00:06:30.560 And I think a lot of people who run bookstores maybe didn't like that message very much.

00:06:35.460 It's not a very trendy message to describe because I don't attribute a lot of the difficulties that my friends and I experienced growing up to systemic forces or to other fashionable sources.

00:06:51.860 And so as a result of that—

00:06:55.060 So it's your diagnosis of the problem.

00:06:56.240 My diagnosis of the problem.

00:06:57.400 Well, I focus a lot on family and the deterioration of family.

00:07:01.100 And that is not a—that's not a topic that a lot of educated elites want to talk about.

00:07:08.760 The other—so that's one possibility for what was happening with the bookstores and why I got frozen out.

00:07:13.400 The other is the associations that I have, some of the endorsements.

00:07:17.900 And so the back of the book, I have endorsements from, you know, people like Nicholas Christakis and people like J.D. Vance.

00:07:28.660 And there's a blurb from you as well, Dr. Peterson.

00:07:31.860 Oh, that'll do it.

00:07:33.220 Well, a friend of mine actually showed me—he was at a bookstore recently, and he showed me that there's a sticker.

00:07:38.580 You know, there's the book, and then they have the sticker of the book, the bookstore price with their logo.

00:07:43.200 And there were two copies of my book, and it was your name carefully covered with these stickers of the bookstore just covering Jordan B. Peterson.

00:07:53.320 And if it was one book, maybe a coincidence, both books, I thought there was—that's, you know, that was intentional.

00:08:00.120 And so I think that as well.

00:08:01.460 But the thing is, even that, I think those two possible reasons are intertwined because you deliver this message as well about responsibility of family of—I think you and I, you know, we discuss a lot of the same issues and a lot of the same social ills that are plaguing society.

00:08:18.920 And so the bookstore promo circuit was shocking to me because I thought that I would have been kind of the right person to do that.

00:08:26.320 But, you know, there are sort of big-name people, you know, there are certain people, certain authors, if they were to do a book signing at a bookstore, it wouldn't work because they're too famous and too well-known, and the store would just get overrun.

00:08:39.940 And then on the other hand, there are authors who don't have a lot of traction online, not a lot of presence in social media and so on, and they wouldn't be able to attract very many people to come for a signing.

00:08:49.480 Whereas for someone like me, I've done a few events now, I'm out here in New York, and I can attract a few dozen people.

00:08:55.400 And that's roughly the right kind of crowd you would expect for a bookstore signing.

00:09:01.680 And yet they had no interest.

00:09:03.100 But, you know, I would look at other authors who are doing bookstore signings, and they, even if they don't have the same online presence as me, they have messages that the legacy media really like.

00:09:17.700 There's that recent memoir, In Defense of Polyamory, of Open Marriages, of, you know, and these bookstores love to host authors like that because it's provocative and interesting, and it promotes a certain dogma, and my book is not like that.

00:09:37.180 And I think that's one possible reason they didn't want me.

00:09:39.500 Well, the funny, one of the things about your book is that it's, in many ways, it's not political.

00:09:47.700 You know, I mean, my sense of your book was that you detailed out the consequence of having your family life fragmented, and the consequences you observed in the kids that you associated with of having their family lives fragmented, right?

00:10:08.160 And you weren't, most of what you said by doing so was implicit rather than explicit, right?

00:10:17.560 You grounded the arguments in your lived experience, so to speak.

00:10:23.520 I mean, that's not all you do because, well, you also make reference to the relevant research literature.

00:10:28.440 But it's appalling, indeed, that you're not encouraged to tell your story because it's a very interesting story, and anyone with any sense would pay attention to it.

00:10:41.280 I'll tell you part of the reason it struck me, but maybe what I'll let you do first, why don't you just tell everybody who's watching and listening, just give them an outline of the book's structure.

00:10:50.400 And so they'll have a better sense, if they haven't read the book, of what we're talking about.

00:10:55.460 So it's an autobiography, but why don't you take it from the top and just walk people through it?

00:11:00.160 Right.

00:11:00.660 Well, I wrote this memoir describing my very unusual trajectory into higher education and some of the lessons and observations I picked up along the way.

00:11:11.400 I was born in Los Angeles into poverty.

00:11:14.680 My mother, she was from Seoul. 0.99

00:11:18.140 She came to the U.S. as a young woman to study.

00:11:20.460 She became addicted to drugs and was unable to care for me.

00:11:24.520 We were homeless for a time.

00:11:26.600 Then we lived in a car.

00:11:28.060 And then eventually we settled in this slum apartment in L.A.

00:11:32.280 And I never knew my father.

00:11:37.700 My mother didn't know who he was either.

00:11:39.400 So I was in this apartment with my mother.

00:11:42.600 She would tie me to a chair with a bathrobe belt while she would get high. 1.00

00:11:50.020 She would have visitors coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night, trading favors for drugs.

00:11:58.060 And by the way, I know all of this information because later I received this thick document full of information from social workers, forensic psychologists, and others who were involved in my case when I was in the foster care system in L.A.

00:12:09.420 And so I read these as an adult as I was writing the book to prepare.

00:12:13.580 And so my mother, she was very neglectful. 0.87

00:12:21.220 Eventually some neighbors called the police.

00:12:23.420 They heard me crying and struggling to break free from this chair.

00:12:27.820 The police arrived.

00:12:28.700 And she's questioned by the police and then later by forensic psychologists asking who's Robert's father, you know, what's going on in this kid's life.

00:12:38.900 She didn't know who my father was either.

00:12:41.540 She claimed that my father's name was Robert and that's who I was named after.

00:12:44.860 But that was the extent of the information she could provide for them.

00:12:47.240 So at age three, my mother was arrested.

00:12:51.420 I was placed into the Los Angeles County foster care system and spent the next just shy of five years living in seven different homes all across L.A.

00:13:01.760 And how old were you when that happened, when you were taken away from her?

00:13:05.180 I was three years old.

00:13:06.240 I was three.

00:13:06.760 Three.

00:13:07.200 Yeah.

00:13:07.420 Okay.

00:13:07.880 Yeah.

00:13:08.500 And then you spent the next seven years in a combination of homes.

00:13:12.160 Yeah.

00:13:12.500 In a variety of different homes.

00:13:14.180 Later, I did get some information about my birth father.

00:13:18.460 So I actually took a 23andMe genetic ancestry test last year.

00:13:22.840 Went my whole life not knowing this, but I'm half Hispanic on my father's side.

00:13:28.000 And, you know, I made this joke.

00:13:29.160 I posted this on X that, you know, I wish I had known this when I was applying to colleges.

00:13:33.460 But, you know, a friend of mine, I showed him the results.

00:13:37.780 And he was like, okay, so, you know, you were sort of Asian mixed race.

00:13:40.700 He was like, you know, you went to bed white adjacent and you woke up as an underrepresented minority.

00:13:46.360 But I didn't know this.

00:13:48.560 And so spent, you know, I lived in El Monte, in San Gabriel Valley.

00:13:54.860 These are kind of rundown areas in Los Angeles.

00:13:57.900 Some of these foster homes had upwards of eight to 10 kids living in them.

00:14:03.140 L.A. is one of the most overburdened.

00:14:05.000 I mean, the foster system in the U.S. in general is extremely stressed as a system.

00:14:10.400 But L.A., it's especially bad.

00:14:12.820 So I remember some of these homes.

00:14:14.200 We'd have four kids to a room.

00:14:16.320 It was two bunk beds, two kids on the top bunk, two kids on the bottom.

00:14:19.660 There are just so many children who need homes and not very many foster parents available.

00:14:25.700 And so the tacit agreement seems to be that, you know, as long as kids are being fed and aren't actively being abused, that it's better for them to be in one of these homes than to be sleeping on the street, which is true.

00:14:39.660 But the system is extremely disorderly.

00:14:44.200 And it's just impossible to supply care for that many kids in, you know, for a limited number of adults.

00:14:51.960 And so I document these experiences in these homes.

00:14:55.980 It was difficult for me for a lot of reasons.

00:14:59.720 But one reason was the level of uncertainty and instability.

00:15:04.200 Because not only would I not know how long I would be in any particular home, but sometimes I'd enter a foster home and I'd befriend some of the other kids there.

00:15:15.880 And then they would be taken.

00:15:17.660 And maybe someone from their family of origin would reenter the picture.

00:15:22.640 And so the kid would return to their aunt or mother or family member, or they'd go to another home.

00:15:29.340 And so, you know, it was just a lot of, I don't know where I'm going to be.

00:15:32.920 I don't know where these kids around me, how much longer they're going to be around.

00:15:36.160 And then eventually, after seven different homes in this cycle, I was adopted by this working class family.

00:15:46.540 And we settled in this kind of dusty town in Northern California called Red Bluff, which is located in one of the poorest counties in the state.

00:15:54.160 And this was the late 90s.

00:15:56.700 And at the time, I wasn't aware of this.

00:15:58.600 I was just, you know, I was a little kid.

00:16:00.340 But in hindsight, you know, having read a lot about class and family formation and what's occurring across the country,

00:16:08.200 I got this front row seat to witness firsthand the kind of family breakdown that scholars like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray and others have been documenting over the last few decades.

00:16:22.140 And so my adoptive parents divorced, and there was a lot of chaos and financial catastrophe and drama, not just in my life with this adoptive family, but the lives of my close friends and those around me in this blue-collar town.

00:16:37.400 And I described some of my friends' experiences and their outcomes as well in the book.

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00:18:18.360 And then you close the book.

00:18:23.160 I mean, so you end up in a family that's actually reasonably stable for some period of time, although it had its instabilities as well.

00:18:31.680 It's confused instabilities.

00:18:33.960 But you go from there to the military.

00:18:38.720 And you actually, this is another reason maybe why your book is contentious,

00:18:42.100 because you actually have pretty positive things to say about your military experience, all things considered.

00:18:47.500 I mean, I think you ran into its limitations for you after it had disciplined you to some degree.

00:18:55.640 But you certainly do point out that for you, especially at that time in your life,

00:19:02.180 the predictability and relative severity of discipline, predictable severity of discipline, was actually very good for you.

00:19:10.840 And you found mentors and a pathway in the military that put you on a solid track.

00:19:17.740 Yeah, that's right.

00:19:19.320 And that got you funneled to higher education.

00:19:22.080 Might as well fill that party in two.

00:19:24.060 Well, yeah, that's right.

00:19:25.460 I mean, enlisting in the first place was, it was not the most well thought through decision.

00:19:31.160 By the time I was 17, going through all of these experiences, I just knew that the path I was on was not the right path.

00:19:40.620 I saw, by this point, I was sort of self-aware and reflective enough that I saw where my life was headed,

00:19:45.900 where the lives of my friends were going.

00:19:47.800 I had two jobs in high school.

00:19:49.080 I worked as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant, and then I was a bag boy at a grocery store.

00:19:56.740 And I had some older male co-workers in their early, mid-20s.

00:20:01.460 And I would interact with them and hang out with them.

00:20:03.940 And, you know, on the one hand, I was 17, and I kind of thought these guys were cool

00:20:07.800 because they'd buy beer and weed for my friends and I.

00:20:10.540 And, you know, they were, you know, they were just older, cool guys who had access to things that my friends and I couldn't access.

00:20:15.360 But I did, even at that time, I did think it was strange that some, you know, 25-year-old guy would want to hang out with a bunch of high schoolers and drink beer with us.

00:20:25.780 And I thought to myself, is this what I want to be when I'm 25?

00:20:30.200 And, you know, that kind of carefree life, living weekend to weekend, is fun when you're 17 or 18. 0.96

00:20:35.260 But when you're 25, it just seemed a little pathetic. 0.70

00:20:39.440 And so I barely graduated high school. 0.56

00:20:43.160 Well, I had a C-minus average, 2.2 GPA.

00:20:48.400 I didn't know what my options were.

00:20:51.380 I mean, well, I knew my options, as far as university were concerned, were basically non-existent.

00:20:56.580 But one of my male high school teachers pulled me aside one day.

00:21:00.720 And he, you know, initially, during the school year, he would sort of prod me and berate me and say,

00:21:08.200 why aren't you doing your homework, what's going on at home, and I would blow him off or I would backtalk.

00:21:14.280 And then eventually, I think he kind of gave up that route and just started talking to me and asking me, you know,

00:21:20.660 we talk about sports or we talk about whatever television, we just talk about whatever was interesting to me.

00:21:26.240 And one day, he showed me a picture of himself in an Air Force uniform on his computer.

00:21:32.280 He pulled up this photo, and he basically said, this might be an option for you.

00:21:36.540 He said, you know, I can tell that you're not academically focused at the moment,

00:21:42.200 but I can tell you're a smart kid, and this might be a good option for you.

00:21:45.480 And so that, you know, that was one of the things that planted the idea in my mind.

00:21:50.860 There were others as well.

00:21:52.580 I lived with my friend and his brother my senior year of high school.

00:21:56.440 And their father had also been in the Air Force, and he tossed that idea out to me.

00:22:00.860 And so there were these kind of male figures in my life, not quite role models,

00:22:04.680 but just older male figures that I trusted.

00:22:07.520 And at that time, I probably wasn't aware of this, but I was longing for that kind of guidance

00:22:13.380 from some older male mentor or figure, just someone who could give me some advice

00:22:17.820 on what I should be doing with my life.

00:22:19.640 I didn't have a father.

00:22:20.720 I had no male presence at home.

00:22:23.580 And so the military became this option.

00:22:26.060 I enlisted as soon as I graduated high school.

00:22:28.600 I was still 17 years old.

00:22:31.420 I had to have my adoptive mother sign a, I mean, essentially it was a permission slip

00:22:36.220 because I was still legally underage.

00:22:38.740 I was the youngest guy in my military unit in basic training.

00:22:42.040 And, you know, in hindsight, that was probably the best decision I ever made

00:22:45.920 because it completely removed me from all of the bad influences of where I was growing up

00:22:51.580 and all of my, all of the sort of, all of the freedom that my friends and I had.

00:22:58.800 I, in the book, I write about this experience.

00:23:00.980 So a friend of mine had been sentenced to prison.

00:23:03.060 And when he got out, I met him, you know, we, we met at a bar, had some beers and I was

00:23:07.400 talking to him and we kind of came to this same conclusion around the benefits of limitations

00:23:12.500 and constraints where we both talked about, you know, I was telling him about my experiences

00:23:17.040 in the military and basic training and all this stuff.

00:23:19.580 And he was telling me about the routine and the mundane, everyday, structured life of prison.

00:23:26.900 And we both came to this conclusion that we both hated it at first, but then after a time,

00:23:32.280 we grew to appreciate it for what it did for us, for providing these boundaries.

00:23:37.220 And my friend, I mean, it was funny.

00:23:39.480 He, he actually said, uh, now that he was out, he actually sometimes missed it.

00:23:43.120 He missed having that predictability and that routine and that structure.

00:23:46.760 And neither one of us had this when we were growing up.

00:23:49.560 And so the military did sort of contain my impulses and give me some structure and channeled

00:23:54.920 some of my aggressive and impulsive energy toward productive ends.

00:23:58.900 In the book, I write about the young male syndrome and how the military finds ways to direct that

00:24:05.800 towards something that is beneficial.

00:24:08.320 Well, you know, the, the, the, the standard hypothesis for hardheaded criminologists with

00:24:15.960 regards to incarceration is pretty, it's pretty blunt and pretty straightforward.

00:24:20.820 You can, there, you know, you know, of course, about the age crime curve.

00:24:25.720 So I think criminality among men peaks at 19 and then it precipitously drops off after 26.

00:24:32.340 And what prison does in many ways is segregate very badly socialized men until they're, until

00:24:42.840 they mature.

00:24:44.320 Now, you know, it doesn't do an optimal job of that, but the standard penological doctrine

00:24:49.440 is it isn't rehabilitation even it's housing, especially for the repeat offenders.

00:24:55.280 It's housing till they, they say burn out, but that isn't really what happens.

00:24:58.640 They don't burn out.

00:24:59.360 They mature.

00:24:59.780 And I think what happens if you grow up in a very, very chaotic environment where there's

00:25:05.400 very little attention paid to the future and everything's about the moment, that there

00:25:11.280 is no structure that facilitates cortical maturation, essentially.

00:25:17.120 You know, you can imagine that all those underlying competing motivational drives, sex, power, aggression,

00:25:24.420 you know, the standard Freudian panoply, they have to be brought together under the rubric of

00:25:29.500 some organizing structure.

00:25:31.080 And that's essentially patriarchal.

00:25:33.320 It's essentially masculine.

00:25:35.120 And I don't think there's any difference.

00:25:38.160 You know, Freud talked about inhibition of aggression and inhibition of sexuality, but that's not a smart way of thinking about it.

00:25:44.080 That was a major error on Freud's part because it's not inhibition, it's integration.

00:25:48.200 And it's maturation.

00:25:50.620 And the cortex is an inhibitory organ, but it's an integrating organ more than anything else.

00:25:56.260 And part of the reason that you were crying out, I would say, in the book for guidance is because you were looking for a story that represented a mode of being that would be, that is, in fact, the pathway to maturity.

00:26:09.920 So here's a definition of maturity.

00:26:11.940 I'll try this out on you and you can tell me what you think about it.

00:26:14.380 So the more immature you are, the more you're dominated by motivational and emotional drives, and they have a very short-term time horizon.

00:26:25.840 The time horizon is basically now.

00:26:28.220 So if you're anxious, you want to stop being anxious now.

00:26:30.800 If you're in an incentive-reward state, excited and enthusiastic, you want gratification now.

00:26:37.080 And now means what's pleasurable in the moment.

00:26:40.220 What maturation means is what works for you in the widest variety of situations over the longest possible span of time.

00:26:49.280 But it also means something else.

00:26:51.120 It means what's good for you and everyone around you in multiple situations for the longest period of time.

00:26:58.960 Now, you need a certain amount of stability in your environment for an attitude like that to even pay off.

00:27:03.980 But I don't think there's any difference between that expansion of time frame and the integration of lower-order drives and emotions and maturation.

00:27:13.180 I think those are all the same thing.

00:27:15.220 And if you're in a chaotic environment, see, the other thing, too, and this is something that's relevant about your memoirs,

00:27:22.000 is my sense has always been that a child that's neurologically intact needs one good model.

00:27:32.060 That's enough.

00:27:33.400 And, like, you can derive it various ways.

00:27:35.320 You derived it partly from reading.

00:27:37.700 But then you put it together piecemeal from the fragments of people you met as well.

00:27:43.020 Right?

00:27:43.380 Zero role models is a catastrophe.

00:27:45.500 And part of the problem with fragmented families is that zero role models is frequently the case.

00:27:55.460 Yeah.

00:27:55.660 And so there's just nothing for a young person to grab onto.

00:27:59.020 The other thing that struck me about—there's many things that struck your book about your book.

00:28:02.660 Another one of the things that struck me, too, is that—and I learned this a while back—is that schools are absolutely appalling,

00:28:10.480 appalling beyond comprehension, at helping young children plan.

00:28:17.900 There's—I built a program online called Future Authoring that helps people plan.

00:28:22.320 And if you give that program to young men before they go to college—this is especially ones true for ones that don't have a very good academic background.

00:28:30.260 If they sit down and write a plan for 90 minutes, unsupervised, with no feedback on the plan, they're 50% less likely to drop out.

00:28:41.160 Wow.

00:28:42.560 Yeah, no kidding.

00:28:43.880 No kidding.

00:28:44.760 50%.

00:28:45.980 Like, it's insane.

00:28:47.520 And what that points to is the fact that no one ever sat them down and said,

00:28:52.120 OK, kid, where do you want to be?

00:28:55.240 You could be somewhere in five years.

00:28:57.640 That's the first thing to announce.

00:28:59.160 Like, you could take control of your life and you could be somewhere in five years.

00:29:03.440 If you could be there, where would it be?

00:29:06.980 Now, I noticed in your book, you know, when people did point that out to you, that was like a life raft for you.

00:29:12.820 And you make that point clear with the story about seeing the older guy that you talked about in uniform.

00:29:19.480 Like, it's something, isn't it?

00:29:20.820 It's some vision of at least a possible future.

00:29:23.640 Right.

00:29:23.900 Yeah.

00:29:24.940 Yeah.

00:29:25.400 And it was, yeah, I didn't have a lot of stable guidance.

00:29:30.040 Like you said, it was fragmentary.

00:29:32.080 It was through books, through pop culture, through some of the people around me.

00:29:36.720 Um, but yeah, I mean, on the, on the point around schools, you know, I, I remember I, so in the book, I think it's, it's quite clear that I'd always had some academic inclination.

00:29:51.340 Uh, I was probably more oriented towards academics than my friends, but my academic performance was responsive to how stable my home life was.

00:30:03.640 When there was stability at home and predictability and adults providing some oversight, my, my grades improved and I started to become more focused on homework and tests.

00:30:16.900 But then inevitably there was just, there were so many reversals and upheavals and my grades responded to that as well.

00:30:25.360 And by the time I reached high school, my grades were in the toilet.

00:30:28.880 So I did pretty well in middle school and I got placed into these advanced courses in high school and I was placed into chemistry, uh, which was one of the advanced science courses.

00:30:38.920 And once, you know, this was, this is kind of where my head was at when I was, I don't know, 14 or 15 years old was the class was, was difficult and I didn't want to put in the effort.

00:30:47.540 Uh, and I had no adults around me saying, you need to do this.

00:30:51.480 You need to put in the effort.

00:30:53.100 And, you know, so impulsive 15 year old kid, I went to my guidance counselor and said, Oh, I want to be put into the lower level science course.

00:31:01.240 And he, he, he gave me this, you know, this spiel about how, uh, you know, it's going to throw off your academic trajectory, but you know, here's this paper.

00:31:09.100 If you can have someone sign it, you know, that's fine.

00:31:11.140 And so I forged my mom's signature and went into the lower, lower level science course.

00:31:16.220 And that was the extent of it.

00:31:17.760 And, you know, when you're a kid without much in the way of guidance or mentorship or role models, it's very easy to make unwise decisions like that.

00:31:26.720 Uh, and I did that repeatedly.

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00:32:35.080 Well, the issue in that situation is quite clear.

00:32:41.960 Why wouldn't you take the easy route out?

00:32:44.340 Yeah.

00:32:44.660 I mean, psychologists always have things backwards, always. 1.00

00:32:48.760 They ask stupid questions like, why do people take drugs? 1.00

00:32:51.500 That's a stupid question. 1.00

00:32:53.200 The question is, why don't people take drugs all the time? 1.00

00:32:56.220 Yeah.

00:32:56.640 Because you can easily get lab animals under some circumstances to just self-administer cocaine nonstop, right?

00:33:02.600 So, the mystery of short-term motivation isn't a mystery.

00:33:07.420 The mystery is, well, under what conditions might a young man be motivated to do something difficult,

00:33:12.500 like take a chemistry course, for example?

00:33:14.680 And the answer to that, so this is a question I have for you too,

00:33:18.160 because you could read your autobiography and your ups and downs academically two ways.

00:33:24.560 You could say, and this is the way you lean, so that's partly why I want to ask you the question.

00:33:29.120 And your grades varied with the stability of your environment.

00:33:32.360 But I'm wondering to what degree your grades varied with the, what would you say,

00:33:37.620 attractiveness of the vision that you saw.

00:33:41.100 You know, because like when you got to the military and you saw a career in front of you,

00:33:45.780 for example, you buckled down and worked like mad.

00:33:48.020 Now, I know you also had the stability there, but, you know, it's not easy to deter,

00:33:54.580 it's not easy to discriminate between the conditions that enable people to thrive,

00:34:00.440 because they can see that their sacrifices, they're making sacrifices towards something they have clearly come to value,

00:34:07.900 versus they're supported by people in a stable environment.

00:34:11.220 So, I'm wondering about your thoughts on that.

00:34:12.840 I, yeah, I like that, that distinction.

00:34:17.260 I, I mean, perhaps sort of implicitly or unconsciously, I was longing for that long-term vision,

00:34:22.980 but I would just say like in the moment it was, you know,

00:34:26.000 I don't think very many 17 or 18 year olds are really thinking that far ahead into the future

00:34:31.060 in a sort of a deliberate, intentional sense.

00:34:34.000 I really think it was about sort of responding to the incentives of the moment

00:34:37.540 and one of the things the military did and what, you know, good parenting and good sort of adults and mentors do

00:34:43.000 is sort of contain that energy so that once the, the young person reaches the point

00:34:48.000 where they have the ability to reflect and consider the future, you know,

00:34:51.980 you sort of shepherd them to that point and now they can sort of think about their own futures

00:34:56.600 and what they want for their lives.

00:34:58.080 Whereas for me, it was more just about making bad decisions and, and containing that to reach that point.

00:35:03.700 Right. Okay. Well, so we could, we could say, we could say that in a stable environment,

00:35:11.200 maybe this is a way of rectifying the two perspectives or, or reconciling them.

00:35:15.440 You could say that in a stable, well-run household,

00:35:19.540 the, the value of the future is implicit in the rituals of the household, right?

00:35:27.720 Like the household itself, the reason we would regard it as well-run and stable

00:35:31.900 is because it does take a long-term view.

00:35:35.360 And so, and your point is, yeah, go ahead.

00:35:38.200 Well, as, as you're, as you're saying this, and then even as I'm thinking about my own answer,

00:35:43.260 I'm realizing it's, it's, I'm actually leaning more and more towards your point now.

00:35:47.580 And, and a story just occurred to me that I tell in the book actually.

00:35:51.060 So there's this, there was a period in my adolescence where there was some stability.

00:35:54.960 My adoptive mother entered a relationship with this woman and they raised me from roughly age nine

00:36:01.520 to 13 and with, you know, some hiccups along the way and after. But I remember I was, I was 13 years

00:36:08.020 old and my mother and her partner, Shelly, they, you know, I had some chores and some responsibilities

00:36:16.260 around the house, but they wanted me to, to build a fire in the mornings so that the house would be

00:36:21.860 warm by the time they got up at seven o'clock to get ready for work. So they asked me to get up at

00:36:25.900 five 45, five 30 and, and do this for them because, you know, heating a home with, with firewood was less

00:36:32.180 expensive than central heating and Northern California can get a bit frosty in the winters.

00:36:37.220 And I remember I argued with them about this and I was angry, uh, this idea that I had to get up so

00:36:42.280 much earlier than everyone else in the house. And my mom and Shelly sat me down and I'm 13 years old.

00:36:47.280 And again, I probably wasn't thinking that much about the future, but they use this,

00:36:51.860 they said, you know, Shelly, she sat me down. She said, your mom and I work all day to pay the

00:36:56.540 bills and. You know, you gotta, you're getting older and you need to contribute to the house.

00:37:01.820 And they, they said, you're the man of the house. And I remember when they used this term,

00:37:06.480 um, it sort of reframed that chore. It went from this burden being put on me that I wanted to battle

00:37:15.320 against to know I'm a, I'm a productive member of this household and I'm doing something for my

00:37:22.920 moms, for my adoptive sister. I'm doing something to make their lives easier. Um, and so perhaps

00:37:31.380 what you're saying about the, about this vision of the future, if it's put in the right way,

00:37:35.280 if the story is told in a right way, and that's what that was, the man of the house was this vision,

00:37:38.920 in this story, that it did unlock something for me in my mind, but you know, it had to be,

00:37:44.600 it had to be presented to me in that way. I wouldn't have arrived there on my own.

00:37:49.640 No, no. Right. But, but I mean, I would say that is the opportunity of responsibility,

00:37:54.540 right? And it does, because it's very easy. And this is why conservatives, I think,

00:38:00.140 have a hard time talking to young people. It's easy to make an obligation into a finger wagging

00:38:06.080 necessity, right? Like a moral obligation. But that, that isn't the right way to frame a genuine

00:38:13.100 responsibility, because if it's a genuine responsibility, it actually matters if you do it.

00:38:19.340 And the reason it matters is because if you don't do it, things actually don't go well.

00:38:24.740 Like there, there's, there's a, there's, there's a, there's a value to your sacrifice. That's a good

00:38:29.280 way of thinking about it. And they did strike the right chord with you. And I remember that part of

00:38:33.540 your book, because what they indicated to you was that that was a way of signaling your mature

00:38:38.640 worth, not, not of signaling it. I don't want to use that language of expanding yourself up into

00:38:44.920 that role. And so, so how long did you light the fire and, and how did you feel about doing that?

00:38:50.560 I mean, it was for that entire winter and actually even, even the winter after that. And I felt,

00:38:56.340 you know, I felt great about doing it after that. I mean, you know, day to day, it was,

00:39:01.920 you know, obnoxious and burdensome. And, you know, there were mornings I woke up and wished

00:39:07.420 I didn't have to do it. But when I would see, you know, my mom and Shelly and everyone in the

00:39:13.460 house wake up after me and, you know, the house was warm and I could see that and people were

00:39:19.180 comfortable. And, you know, when I woke up, it was freezing. And then when they woke up, it was warm.

00:39:24.500 And then I would go to school in the mornings with that knowledge. And right. Yeah. I felt,

00:39:29.720 I felt good about myself for doing that. Yeah. Yeah. And that was one of the bright spots.

00:39:34.660 See, that's very, well, that, well, that's so interesting, right? Because that, that shows you

00:39:38.720 too, that, that the idea that you're inhibiting your impulsiveness is not right, is the, what you're

00:39:45.000 doing is you're transforming the idea of responsibility into an incentive reward, technically, by associating

00:39:50.680 with a, with an overarching goal, like, but a, but a genuine goal. And you might say, well, goals are

00:39:56.000 arbitrary. It's a morally relevant, moral relativism argument, but they're not arbitrary. Because for

00:40:01.500 example, if the house is cold, then people suffer. Now you could say, well, that's arbitrary too. But,

00:40:08.300 you know, if you're the sort of person who thinks that suffering is arbitrary and, and you can make

00:40:12.540 relative arguments about it, there's no sense talking to you anyways, because it's just not going to go

00:40:16.860 anywhere. But it's so interesting to see that, you know, the, the proper framing of that task

00:40:23.260 transfer. I know, I understand the fact that it was still difficult for, you still had to get up in

00:40:27.600 the morning when it was cold and light the fire, you know? So it didn't change the dis, the proximal

00:40:32.720 discomfort, but they awakened you to a higher order way of apprehending your environment, you know? And

00:40:39.020 it's clearly the case, it's continually the case through your autobiography that when someone opens a

00:40:46.200 door like that for you in a way that you, that got to you, you know, that you found credible, that you

00:40:52.320 were instantly motivated. You even did that to yourself to some degree with reading. So why don't

00:40:59.060 you walk through that too? Because, you know, that was the first account I had read of someone who

00:41:02.840 learned to read well at an old enough age, so they remember the realization. So, you know, what happens

00:41:11.600 to lots of kids, and this is so appalling because there's no excuse for it whatsoever. So, reading is

00:41:17.260 burdensome until you can read for meaning, right? So if you're sounding out words, or even if you're

00:41:26.060 sounding out phrases, or even if you're still trying to figure out sentences, you know, because you

00:41:31.240 haven't automatized the perceptions, then it's effortful. But as soon as you cross that threshold,

00:41:36.780 and now you're reading for meaning, it's instantly, insanely rewarding. And so what you need to teach

00:41:44.300 kids how to read is masked practice at automatization, right? So they need to see B's, P's, Q's, and D's

00:41:53.960 10,000 times so that they build a neural circuit that just recognizes letters, recognizes two-letter

00:42:01.980 combinations, three-letter combinations, you know, common words, then common phrases. That's about

00:42:07.260 when you get to be an expert reader. But you can remember actually working through that yourself.

00:42:13.220 So why don't you tell the story about learning to read, why you decided to do that, and then also

00:42:17.800 what reading did for you? Right. Yeah, I didn't learn to read until I was seven, and, you know, most people

00:42:26.040 have memories of age seven, and that was an important memory for me. So I was changing schools every three

00:42:33.840 to six months, changing homes, and no one read to me. And so I had to teach myself. I remember it being

00:42:45.760 a really, I remember just being embarrassed initially, you know. By that point, second grade, teachers would

00:42:51.340 start to call on kids to read aloud in class. And, you know, I would make a joke or say I didn't bring

00:42:58.140 the right book, or I would find ways to get out of it. But I remember at one point, my teacher said,

00:43:06.000 you know, she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I think I said I wanted to be a

00:43:09.280 scientist. And this was because I'd caught some bit of Bill Nye the Science Guy on TV back in the 90s

00:43:16.260 at this time. And, you know, she said, if you want to be a scientist, you have to learn to read. And

00:43:20.880 I said, Bill Nye never reads. And, you know, she said, well, he doesn't read on TV, but, you know,

00:43:25.740 every scientist has to learn to read. And so what do you, you know, like, okay, so if I want to be a

00:43:30.100 scientist, I have to read. It sounds like, and then by that point, I started to piece together that

00:43:33.520 really, if you want it to be anything, you have to read. And so the teacher let me borrow some

00:43:39.960 kindergarten-level books. I took them home and slowly worked my way through it. And,

00:43:44.580 you know, I knew the alphabet, and I knew how to sound out each letter. But it took a lot of

00:43:51.240 effort to get to that breakthrough point that you just mentioned of, okay, here are the individual

00:43:56.080 letters, and then here are the words, and then you put the words together. And then after working

00:44:01.300 through that repeatedly, again, with books meant for four- and five-year-olds, and I'm seven,

00:44:05.740 finally, it started to click. And I could see the images in my mind of, okay, you know, now things are

00:44:12.020 clicking for me, and there's a story being told here. But it, you know, I didn't even understand

00:44:18.460 that that's what I was supposed to be doing when I was reading. I would listen to stories that others

00:44:22.520 would tell me when they would read. Yeah.

00:44:24.620 I wonder if that's the point where you, where the auditory and the visual cortex are now,

00:44:30.480 there's an overlap area, eh, between them. And the overlap areas between the higher order areas

00:44:37.400 of the cortex are the areas that Luria, Alexander Luria, the great Russian neuropsychologist,

00:44:42.700 identified with consciousness per se. I wonder if that breakthrough moment when you, because that

00:44:47.560 was quite striking in your book, because you said you remember when you became proficient enough at

00:44:53.260 reading, which is really an auditory phenomenon, right? You're using your eyes as ears when you're

00:44:57.820 reading. And then all of a sudden, it's hooked to your visual imagination, right? That connection

00:45:03.040 emerges. It's got to be an overlapping system. So now the words can activate the images. And that's

00:45:08.380 when true understanding begins. It was very interesting to me to see that you could actually

00:45:12.560 remember when that happened. You know, but it's a sad thing, you know, it's, this is, this is an

00:45:17.020 unforgivable failing of the education system because computerized tutors could teach every child to

00:45:24.400 automatize letter and word recognition. Oh, it's like the smart kids, the higher IQ kids are going

00:45:31.780 to learn to automatize faster, but it would be a rare kid indeed who wouldn't get there with sufficient

00:45:38.340 mass practice. And a computer, computers are so good at that, you know, so good at presenting,

00:45:44.540 presenting, rewarding, presenting, rewarding, presenting, rewarding. And that's all you need. You just need

00:45:48.940 that immediate feedback. Now, see, you said something very interesting in that story too,

00:45:53.680 because you linked your motivation once again to something approximating a vision or a plan.

00:46:00.220 You know, you said you had nursed as a child, even though it was just more or less a casual

00:46:04.800 encounter with Bill Nye, you thought, well, maybe a scientist is something I could be. Okay. So now

00:46:09.680 that gleamed as a distal vision. And then the teacher informed you that you were going to have to learn

00:46:14.360 to read because you got to ask yourself, you know, what in the world was it that actually

00:46:18.380 compelled you to swallow your pride and admit that you could only read kindergarten books?

00:46:24.460 That's a tough blow. And it's really easy for kids who should have learned something earlier to do

00:46:30.660 everything they can not to admit that to themselves because it's embarrassing. So, but you did admit it

00:46:35.900 to yourself and then you went and you actually studied, which is by yourself, which is actually

00:46:40.420 quite a difficult thing to do when, when you're not extracting out meaning from the words. Do you

00:46:45.340 remember at that time, like, was it because you had, I don't want to put hypotheses into your mind,

00:46:51.400 but what do you think it was that actually motivated you to do that work?

00:46:56.320 Hmm. Well, I think, I think a part of it was maybe a sort of a baser motivation of just not wanting to

00:47:01.340 be embarrassed in class anymore when the teachers would call on me to read, wanting to keep up with

00:47:06.160 the other kids, being able to communicate with, you know, cause kids would talk about books or,

00:47:10.820 you know, be able to make friends and to not be, you know, this oddball kid who always had to find

00:47:17.840 ways to skirt the coursework. Uh, and, and then yes, seeing, seeing people on TV or people,

00:47:25.320 movies and these images of, of people who seem to be interesting and successful and so on. And

00:47:31.660 that seemed like something I, yeah, that I wanted to, I, I aspired to something like that. I mean,

00:47:39.200 it's funny, like you, you, you mentioned, you know, high IQ kids can sort of find their way into

00:47:43.760 teaching themselves to read and going down that path. And that's, that is what I did. But I mean,

00:47:48.160 it's funny. So, so right around this time when I was teaching myself to read, I was doing so badly

00:47:52.320 in school that, um, the teacher and my social worker, they, they thought that I might've had a

00:47:59.380 learning disability. Um, and again, I was changing schools all the time and changing homes.

00:48:05.620 And, you know, in, in, in hindsight, I thought it was a little bit, you know, it's, it's, it's ridiculous

00:48:09.500 that, and you have this young boy who's not doing well in school and the, instead of sort of

00:48:15.700 investigating this, you know, living in foster care and all of the instability and disorder,

00:48:20.260 the response was to medicalize it or to put some kind of diagnostic label on it. And, you know,

00:48:27.100 fortunately, so they sent this psychologist to the home and I took this test and I scored,

00:48:31.500 I actually scored just below average. So I was like in the range of normal. And part of the reason

00:48:35.460 I scored so low, I did okay on the other portions, uh, the other subdomains of the test, but the verbal

00:48:40.080 score was really low. And that's because I didn't, I didn't know how to read. Um, and some of the,

00:48:45.920 you know, some of the questions I gave this half-hearted effort, it was a very sort of messy,

00:48:49.100 my responses to this. And again, I have, I have, uh, the, the files and the reports from this period.

00:48:53.840 And so, you know, it's just, you know, coincidence or, you know, very fortunate, I guess, that I,

00:49:02.780 I scored just high enough to avoid being labeled and medicalized and so on. Um, but one of the

00:49:10.200 points I try to make in the book as well, you know, the, the question around IQ and nature and

00:49:13.760 nurture and so on is that having a, having curiosity and academic aptitude is, is necessary, but not

00:49:19.220 sufficient to do well in school. And so I had the sort of raw ingredients. Um, but that's, that,

00:49:26.380 you know, that's just one portion of it. You also need it to be channeled. You need all of the other

00:49:30.280 things you and I've been discussing. And I didn't have any of that. And so I, it wasn't until I wasn't

00:49:34.340 in an environment, uh, where, you know, my, you know, in order for, for my habits to have been stable

00:49:41.580 and predictable, I needed to be in an environment that was stable and predictable. And once I reached that

00:49:46.000 environment, then those good quality started to shine through, they shined through on occasion

00:49:50.980 when I was in school, but it wasn't the same. And so, yeah, the, the reading portion was important.

00:49:56.220 Once, once I learned to read, um, that became, uh, a source of comfort and it was soothing for me.

00:50:04.600 Uh, once I started to go to school libraries, check out books, I started to read biographies and

00:50:11.280 memoirs. And this was a way for me to, you know, I was sort of drawn to people who also

00:50:16.740 had undergone and risen above difficult circumstances. And I didn't know at that time,

00:50:24.160 you know, I wasn't consciously aware that I was seeking out these stories

00:50:26.880 for some specific reason, but in hindsight, I think I was looking for some kind of inspiration

00:50:32.120 or some, a source of, a source of guidance. Yeah. Yeah. Well, definitely, definitely. And,

00:50:40.040 and, and, and unsurprisingly, I mean, that's what stories are for fundamentally. And it doesn't,

00:50:46.580 it's not surprising at all that you would gravitate to the ones that bore most specifically on your

00:50:51.980 circumstances. It's also interesting too, you know, that this is part of that interplay between

00:50:57.600 environmental instability and planning. There isn't a lot of point in planning if your plans

00:51:04.660 are always going astray for reasons that you can't control, right? And it is also something

00:51:10.120 that can undermine your faith in planning itself. And one of the things the military did for you

00:51:14.480 clearly was set up a circumstance where the rules of the game were very clear, right? If you,

00:51:22.800 if you did the work, you were going to get the reward and that actually worked, right? And so you

00:51:28.880 say in your book, for example, that there was one, at one point you were promoted much earlier,

00:51:35.120 much more quickly in the training regime than was typical, right? So you could also see a direct

00:51:40.920 payoff there. You know, it's, it shouldn't say direct. It worked on both ends, Jordan. It was,

00:51:46.340 it was the reward was immediate. You know, you, you perform these tasks in Excel, you'll be rewarded.

00:51:53.160 And then on the other side of that, if you commit these transgressions, if you violate these

00:52:00.240 guidelines, you'll immediately and swiftly be punished. I think both of those things were

00:52:04.040 important. You know, you're sort of almost trapped. The military is like this, I don't know,

00:52:08.500 like a giant Skinner box or something of like, do this, you know, you know, positive reinforcement,

00:52:12.800 negative, it's all there. And, and so even something as simple as failing a drug test.

00:52:18.360 So they have these random drug tests. You never know when it's going to occur. If you fail a drug

00:52:21.600 test, you can be court-martialed and go to military prison. Whereas in the outside world,

00:52:26.300 for my friends, for example, who didn't follow that same path, I mean, you can do a lot of drugs. 0.95

00:52:31.880 You can have a lot of promiscuous sex. You can commit a lot of crimes and drink and drive. You can do

00:52:36.660 all of these things. And that can carry on for years before finally the consequences arise from

00:52:42.740 that. Whereas the military had this system in place that, you know, if you drink and drive once

00:52:47.360 and you're caught, you know, that's, you know, then it's prison. If you do this, you know, it's

00:52:52.060 the penalties are very explicit, clear and swift. And so it works, it works on both, both ends,

00:52:58.540 punishment and reward. And I think both of those pieces in place were important for me. I mean,

00:53:03.300 it's funny, I did do well on the military exams and the promotion, and I was always promoted ahead of

00:53:08.380 schedule. And it's strange because even in those moments, my good and bad qualities kind of shined

00:53:15.920 through. I was promoted early and I earned those promotions. But, you know, as I was writing the

00:53:22.560 book and describing my experiences, it may not have been ideal for me to have achieved promotions so

00:53:28.160 early. Because in the military, at least in the Air Force at this time, once you reach a certain rank,

00:53:32.660 they allow you to move off base and get a house or a place outside in the civilian world. You know,

00:53:38.380 you still go to the base for work when you're on duty, but then you go home to your residence.

00:53:42.680 And so I got promoted very quickly. And when I was 19, I got a house with some friends off base.

00:53:48.300 And we turned this into like this giant kind of party house. And that allowed me to make bad

00:53:54.340 decisions and drink a lot and get into trouble. And so strangely, you know, it's almost sort of

00:54:04.300 ironic that the fact that I was able to excel led to this point where I was able to be in a position

00:54:09.820 of complete freedom again, and again, start to make self-defeating decisions. So anyway.

00:54:16.120 Right, right. Well, one of the things, okay, so let's talk about the chaos a bit more. You know,

00:54:22.480 because when I was reading your book, there's certain overlap in our experience. Because I came

00:54:29.380 from a little town, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, and it was only about 50 years old,

00:54:33.940 and it was a working class community. And most of my friends never went to college or university. A few

00:54:42.160 did, but not many. And, but there were some differences between, some important differences

00:54:49.680 between my time of upbringing and yours. Okay. So almost all my parents' friends had intact families.

00:54:59.740 So my mom and dad had, let's say, five sets of close family friends. And this was also true for my

00:55:06.380 relatives, by the way, my mom and dad's siblings. So my aunts and my uncles. Virtually no divorce.

00:55:13.280 It was also true for my friends. Now, my relationship with my father was much better than the relationship

00:55:22.600 most of my friends had with their fathers. That was often a consequence of alcoholism. Not always, but often.

00:55:30.300 But all my friends who had certainly the same kind of delinquent tendencies as the people that, as you and the

00:55:37.740 people that you describe hanging around with, they all had intact families. Right? So the thing that

00:55:44.300 really struck me about reading your biography was the additional cataclysmic consequences of

00:55:52.240 continually fragmented primary relationships. Yeah. Well, this is, I mean, it's, yeah, it's, that is an

00:55:59.260 interesting point. I mean, I remember listening to you sort of describe your early life in other

00:56:07.060 platforms and podcasts and mediums and thinking about how sort of working class communities have

00:56:13.640 changed over time. So I cite some statistics from Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart, where, you know,

00:56:23.320 one of the most striking ones from that book is that in 1960, 95% of children born in the U.S.,

00:56:30.640 regardless of social class, socioeconomic status, were raised by both of their birth parents.

00:56:37.540 And by 2005, for the upper class, for people with college-educated parents with white-collar jobs,

00:56:44.640 it dropped from 95% in 1960 to 85% in 2005. So a slight dip, but it's still the norm, two-parent,

00:56:52.780 intact families are the norm in kind of upper and upper middle class areas. Whereas for the working 0.90

00:56:57.320 class, it dropped from 95% in 1960 to 30% in 2005. These are non-college-educated, blue-collar

00:57:05.680 working class. And that, when I read that statistic, it perfectly reflected my own experiences. You know,

00:57:11.940 now, you know, post-college, the friends that I have made since, you know, leaving the military and

00:57:17.800 obtaining degrees and so on, all of them without fail have been raised in intact families. And

00:57:24.640 then I think back to Red Bluff and my time there. And I had five close friends growing up. I write

00:57:30.140 about some of their experiences in the book. And of the six of us, none of us were raised by both of

00:57:34.720 our birth parents. There was me sort of raised in foster homes in varying states of disorder.

00:57:40.060 I had friends raised by single moms, one friend raised by a single dad, one friend raised by his

00:57:46.840 grandmother because his mom was addicted to drugs and his dad was in prison. And that's like a very

00:57:51.280 common picture now of what these communities look like. You know, I remember seeing an interview with

00:57:57.720 you, Jordan. I don't remember which it was, but you described how family deterioration has sort of hit

00:58:04.620 people based on sort of their level of marginalization and vulnerability and predilections

00:58:10.560 and so forth and how it sort of hit sort of poor black families first and then, you know, poor white

00:58:16.540 families, working class families. And now what I was seeing in Red Bluff by the late 90s, even kind of

00:58:21.960 lower middle class families were also kind of deteriorating more and more, sort of creeping more and

00:58:27.560 more upward. But there's still that sort of rarefied upper segment of society, the top quintile,

00:58:33.460 say, the top 20 percent, that they are almost completely shielded from this and have no exposure

00:58:39.000 to what's happening in the rest of society. Yeah, well, let's go there. I want to walk through

00:58:46.980 your biography a bit more so that we can talk about your experiences with higher education. Maybe we can

00:58:52.540 meld that into what we're going to talk about next. Okay, so I left my little town and got a college

00:59:00.440 education first, and then I went to a fairly large university in Edmonton, and then I went to McGill.

00:59:05.060 And so I was kind of climbing up the ladder of sophistication and educational sophistication and

00:59:12.420 urban size, right? And so, and then I went from McGill to Harvard. And so, I came from that little town

00:59:17.520 and hit the top of the academic pyramid. It's certainly, that was the case in the 1990s, and that

00:59:22.520 was really something. And so, I got a chance to see. So, in Alberta, in the province I grew up in,

00:59:28.200 there wasn't much of a class structure at all. Alberta was too new to have a class structure. 0.92

00:59:32.700 Montreal had a clear class structure, and Boston, of course, much clearer than Montreal even.

00:59:37.460 And so, I got to see what it meant that a class structure existed. And one of the things I really

00:59:46.420 came to understand as I progressed through the university system was this warped, elitist culture

00:59:55.500 that increasingly came to characterize the universities. And so, what I saw, look, a lot of

01:00:00.340 the students I had at Harvard were really top-rate kids. And Harvard in the 90s was a very merit-based

01:00:08.220 institution. Now, if you were a legacy student, if your parents had gone to Harvard, you had an edge

01:00:14.200 at admissions. But even so, the probability that you were going to be a legacy student who couldn't cut it

01:00:20.080 was pretty damn low. So, and the typical student was extremely academically gifted and then good at

01:00:27.740 at least two other things, right? So, these were stellar students. But the more radical types,

01:00:34.920 they had this proclivity that really disturbed me, which was that having all the privileges of being

01:00:41.600 privileged wasn't nearly enough. They needed to have all the privileges of being privileged and all the

01:00:48.200 privileges of being underprivileged at the same time. And so, I want to run a variant of the luxury

01:00:54.540 beliefs idea past you. Because I think luxury beliefs have, which is a lovely phrase, by the way,

01:01:01.240 they have two dimensions. The first is, they provide you with a universal explanation for very complex

01:01:10.580 phenomena so you don't have to think about them ever again. And the oppressor-oppressed narrative fits that

01:01:16.720 perfectly, right? Because you can analyze, it's like Marxism gone, it's like manic Marxism.

01:01:25.400 Marx at least had the sense to note that the primary differentiator in terms of oppression was

01:01:32.180 economic. And you can make a reasonable case that to those who have more accrues, and you can also

01:01:39.880 make a case that once you have, it's easy to engage in regulatory capture to make the playing field

01:01:47.380 unfair so you can sustain your advantage. Okay, and so if you're going to throw the Marxists their bone,

01:01:53.740 that would be the bone to throw them. Well, Marxism fell out of favor in the 1970s, even among

01:01:59.820 intellectuals, although they were very annoyed about it. And then it morphed into this meta-Marxism where

01:02:05.460 every single possible comparison between people became an oppressor-oppressed comparison.

01:02:12.020 Now, the advantage to that is that you can learn that analytic process in 10 minutes.

01:02:20.260 So we did some research in 2016 that showed very clearly that the best predictor of politically

01:02:27.060 correct authoritarianism, so you can imagine that that's this insistence upon an oppressor-oppressed

01:02:33.540 narrative. There's a cloud of ideas that surrounds that. The best predictor of that was low verbal

01:02:37.740 intelligence. It was a walloping predictor. It was correlated, I think it was negative 0.48.

01:02:43.960 It was more correlated than grades and IQ. It was a walloping correlation. Okay, but there's another

01:02:50.240 element too that, and this is probably more germane specifically to the notion of luxury belief,

01:02:55.440 is that imagine that people have beliefs because they explain the world, but also imagine that they

01:03:02.720 have beliefs because they confer upon the holder unearned moral virtue. And this oppressor-oppressed

01:03:12.400 narrative is a two-for-one because it provides you with a comprehensive explanation of every

01:03:17.580 sociological, political, and economic interaction imaginable, because they can all be viewed through

01:03:23.480 the lens of power. Plus, it presents you with a one-move solution to being moral.

01:03:32.120 And it's, sorry, there's three elements. The one-move solution is you identify with the oppressed,

01:03:39.560 you're virtuous. But then there's the shadow of that, which is once you've identified the oppressor,

01:03:46.760 you have a valid target for your darkest desires. So you've got three, three attractions to that

01:03:55.480 dread doctrine, right? Stupid people can understand it quickly with no effort. 1.00

01:04:02.120 That works out real well in departments of education, for example, or faculties of education, 1.00

01:04:06.440 or social work. Yes, absolutely. Well, we know perfectly well that the disciplines in universities

01:04:12.300 that have the students with the lowest IQ are the most woke. Like the data on that are crystal clear.

01:04:17.420 So they're crystal clear, right? So it's very attractive if you're not very bright. And

01:04:22.940 that's also attractive to your teachers if they're also not very bright. And I'm talking about you,

01:04:27.900 faculties of education professors. And so, and then you are morally virtuous because you're standing

01:04:34.620 for the oppressed or for the, yeah, for the oppressed, or you can even claim oppression for

01:04:39.640 yourself, at least by proxy. And so there you get to have the advantage of being in the oppressor class,

01:04:47.180 which you clearly are if you're in an elite university. But because you're an ally, you don't

01:04:53.320 have to, right, exactly. You don't have to pay any attention to that. Plus now you have a target for

01:04:57.040 your, this is where I think the anti-Semitism is really instantly understandable, right? 0.98

01:05:02.540 Because there's nothing more fun than being anti-Semitic with a moral twist. But if you

01:05:08.500 read the history of anti-Semitism, it's always been that way. That's not new. That's not new.

01:05:13.880 You identify the Jews as oppressors, and then you're moral for persecuting them. And that's 0.95

01:05:19.940 perfect, right, if you're resentful and bitter, and you need a target for your bile and spite.

01:05:27.020 That oppressor-oppress narrative, it just gives you all of that at once. And that seems to me,

01:05:33.780 so you have worked a lot at fleshing out this idea of luxury beliefs, and I believe coined the term

01:05:40.120 and popularized it, which is, you know, quite an achievement because it's hard to, it's hard to hit

01:05:45.280 a phrase so accurately that it becomes a, you know, it becomes, well, it becomes a known phrase. It

01:05:53.180 becomes part of the culture. You have to have a kind of poetic accuracy to do that. So tell me what

01:05:59.520 you think about that conceptualization of luxury belief, and if there's anything that, in your

01:06:03.700 estimation, it lacks.

01:06:05.780 Well, so I coined this term luxury beliefs, defined as ideas and opinions that confer status on the elite

01:06:14.500 while inflicting costs on the lower classes. And no, I think that all of those sort of ideas that

01:06:22.400 you laid out there fall under that framework. A core feature of a luxury belief, too, is that the

01:06:28.280 believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. And so, you know, as you're describing

01:06:34.780 this, you know, the oppressor-oppressed, you don't have to think too deeply. I'm reminded of a quote from

01:06:39.680 the cognitive scientist, Pascal Boyer. He has this line, theory is information for free. And it's

01:06:46.980 kind of this tongue-in-cheek line that, you know, once you have the theory, you don't have to learn

01:06:51.740 anything because you just enter this new environment and you learn a few facts, but you have this theory

01:06:56.360 available to you to just sort of twist everything into this system. It's a compression algorithm.

01:07:02.380 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a compression algorithm. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Often a biased compression

01:07:06.860 algorithm. Yeah, yeah, and it allows you to bypass the difficult work of learning. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:07:13.700 Well, and then if you're removed from the consequences, which you are if you're protected 1.00

01:07:17.960 by your wealth, then you also are never in a situation where your idiot theories can be disproven. 1.00

01:07:24.020 Yeah, yes, yeah. And then by the time your ideas are implemented into policy or into culture, 1.00

01:07:34.320 you move on to the next thing and you can just sort of outrun the consequences of your own

01:07:39.380 beliefs. It doesn't always work that way, but often it does. And then, yeah, the oppressor

01:07:45.300 oppressed the ability to claim the mantle of virtue. I mean, I saw that so often. I see it still at elite

01:07:59.360 universities that, you know, these inhabitants, these graduates, students and graduates of elite

01:08:07.340 universities. It's, you know, it's not enough for them to be members of the sort of socioeconomic

01:08:12.920 one percent, but they also want to be seen as good people. And I think they're, you know, they wrestle

01:08:18.480 with some of this guilt, I think, for being so privileged and so fortunate. And so they attempt

01:08:24.480 to compensate by, you know, exploiting, I mean, I saw this a lot at Yale, they're exploiting whatever

01:08:30.520 commonality they have with historically mistreated groups. And some of it honestly seemed strategic

01:08:37.220 and duplicitous because, you know, these are very competitive institutions and every edge helps.

01:08:46.560 And so if you can claim to be non-binary or you can claim to be a member of this or that or the other

01:08:52.140 group, then you can get an edge in a prestigious internship or into the law school of your choice or

01:08:57.760 whatever student organization. Well, you can also see how that can produce. So a lot of psychopathology

01:09:06.020 is positive feedback loop gone mad, right? And so you can see a positive feedback loop there because

01:09:11.900 the ideology tilts in the direction of privileging marginalization. Well, then all you have to do is

01:09:18.360 claim marginalization to become privileged. Well, then the thing is just like, you're just done,

01:09:22.780 especially as you pointed out, when the really competitive types and there's nothing, I mean,

01:09:28.100 one of the real advantages to the U.S. elite, let's say, is their insanely driven competitiveness.

01:09:34.380 But look the hell out if that's taken a, you know, a bent turn because now it's going to be,

01:09:40.740 well, it's so interesting too, because as you point out, it's competition for marginalization

01:09:44.920 without bearing any of the costs of marginalization, right? So that's a pretty good deal.

01:09:49.340 And there are probably more nefarious things going on under the surface too, like what reproduction,

01:09:56.080 interference with reproduction of other people is a mating strategy, it's a reproductive strategy. 0.98

01:10:02.280 And so God only knows how deep that goes.

01:10:04.500 Yeah, just very, so I did read this study, his name escapes me, but he's a professor,

01:10:08.860 I believe, at the Columbia Business School. And it's really interesting. So he did this study of

01:10:13.620 students at elite universities and their willingness to disclose marginalized identities.

01:10:22.580 And what he found was that for, you know, for the identity categories that the elite care a lot

01:10:29.320 about, that they claim are beleaguered and disadvantaged and oppressed and so on, sexuality,

01:10:35.820 ethnicity, orientation, those things, that students at elite universities are not concealing

01:10:42.080 those identities, that typically in public settings, they are willing to discuss these aspects of

01:10:46.920 their identity. The only, there was only one marginalized identity that students were very

01:10:52.000 reluctant to discuss publicly at elite universities in those settings. And to me, unsurprisingly,

01:10:59.200 that identity was low socioeconomic status, that students were embarrassed about being very poor if

01:11:05.520 they came from those backgrounds. And that's the one thing that these places don't talk about is class.

01:11:10.360 Well, it's so interesting because you can think of this postmodern pathology as a variant of

01:11:17.900 Marxism, but it's actually a rebellion against Marxism at the same time, right? Because it isn't that the

01:11:24.480 axis of oppression, it's not only that they've multiplied, it's that the axis of oppression have

01:11:32.000 multiplied and supplanted the economic, right? So the one axis where the oppressor, oppressed narrative

01:11:41.400 can probably obtain the most purchase is the one that has the least cachet. So if you're poor and

01:11:47.420 white, it's irrelevant. The fact that you're poor is irrelevant. 0.90

01:11:50.560 Yeah. I mean, even if you're poor and non-white, honestly, I mean, it's really interesting, 1.00

01:11:55.120 these institutions where there's a lot of embarrassment about being very rich. So students

01:12:00.920 aren't going to brag about coming from very wealthy families, they'll conceal that identity.

01:12:06.700 But they are also, you know, the poor students will also conceal that identity as well. It's like

01:12:12.020 everyone wants, you know, that the myth in America, everyone's middle class. And I think there's 0.83

01:12:16.240 something about universities too, that no student wants to be known as poor, no student wants to be

01:12:19.820 known as rich. But being poor is a, like that is, like you're describing, that is actually something

01:12:29.240 that Marx got right, that actually being very poor is very difficult, especially in the modern West,

01:12:35.860 that these other identities, we've gone a long way to becoming more tolerant and welcoming and so on.

01:12:40.800 But being poor, regardless of time and place, it's always difficult. And that's the one thing that

01:12:46.680 these universities and the students within them don't want to discuss or concentrate on.

01:12:51.260 Well, I also think that the, the overwhelming emphasis on sexual identity has an unbelievably

01:12:58.100 dark shadow too, because I mean, sexuality, like any primal drive is very, when in its full

01:13:06.780 manifestation, it's very focused on the immediate. Now, everyone knows that sexuality like aggression 1.00

01:13:15.440 can be exploitative. In fact, the woke types squeak about that all the time, because they view most

01:13:23.700 heterosexual normativity as exploitative sexuality. They know, they're perfectly aware that sexuality can be 0.58

01:13:30.840 exploitative. But if you're, if you're out for a hedonistic time, then valorizing your sexual identity is the

01:13:37.680 best way of transforming a vice into a moral virtue, right? It's very, it's unbelievably, it's unbelievably

01:13:44.080 dark. Now, one of the things I've been quite struck by recently too, so there's a lot of research on the

01:13:49.680 dark tetrad now, right? Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism, because they had to add

01:13:56.760 sadism, because it looks like those other three culminate in sadism. Okay, so here's a question.

01:14:02.900 What predicts short-term mating proclivity? The answer is, well, it's dark tetrad proclivity.

01:14:10.540 And that, that's related to something even more deep, even more deep biologically, because there's

01:14:15.320 two types of reproductive strategy. There's K and R, and K means carrying capacity, and R just think

01:14:22.300 means just reproduction. Like a mosquito is an R reproducer. So it has like a million offspring,

01:14:27.720 and like one lives. Human beings are the ultimate exemplar of K strategizers. Very few offspring, 0.97

01:14:34.960 extremely high investment. But then within human beings, there are K and R reproducers. And the 1.00

01:14:41.080 R reproducers are the dark tetrad types. And so you can't have sexual licentiousness

01:14:47.580 on the basis of identity without inviting in the sadistic psychopaths. So that's another fun little, 0.99

01:14:55.200 little twist on the luxury belief phenomenon.

01:14:57.520 On this idea of, you know, defining, I mean, it's what I find interesting about people who

01:15:02.140 want to speak and proclaim about their identities around sexual orientation is there, many people

01:15:10.160 are happy to identify with this sexual orientation or that, but very few people seem to be willing or

01:15:17.940 eager to be identified with their actual sexual history in terms of their actual behavior.

01:15:23.540 And I'm speaking, I'm thinking here around this idea around slut shaming, or around how many

01:15:30.620 partners you've had, or, you know, what, what young people now call body count. There's a lot of

01:15:35.400 concern around, you know, don't speak about that. Don't shame people for their, but it's interesting

01:15:40.680 because people will identify with the label, but then disavow the action around the label or,

01:15:48.780 or any label really. Yeah. Their sexual history. Well, I would say as a clinician, I would say the

01:15:54.560 rationale for that's quite clear because look, one of the best predictors, one of the, one of the most

01:16:00.320 reliable correlates and predictors of later criminality is early promiscuity. That's been known for like

01:16:06.940 40 years. And it's partly because the psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian sadists exploit other 0.97

01:16:15.420 people and themselves for sexual gratification. Well, the reason that there's a brouhaha about 0.97

01:16:21.660 slut shaming is because the hedonistic narcissists don't want to be called out for their behavior. 0.96

01:16:28.520 And so what they do is they make being held responsible for their own deviant and exploitative 0.98

01:16:35.100 behavior. They make being called out on that, a moral failing of the person they're accusing.

01:16:39.520 Yeah. Which is a really interesting maneuver. And it reminds me of, there was a big study in

01:16:46.860 20, I want to say it was 2020, which found that the, so this was on the dark triad. Sadism wasn't

01:16:55.440 studied in this particular paper, but they found that the dark triad traits correlated with victim

01:17:01.340 signaling. Yeah. Well, that's a typical cluster B, typical cluster B psychopathology. It's like

01:17:07.560 the way that you, you cover up your predation with the claim of victimization.

01:17:13.900 Right. Absolutely. Absolutely.

01:17:15.980 And it was really interesting. I mean, the researchers of this paper,

01:17:19.200 you know, they, they described how, you know, billions of dollars are lost in insurance fraud

01:17:23.980 cases and hundreds of millions rather in insurance fraud cases. And so like people will lie to advantage

01:17:28.780 themselves and people who score highly in the dark triad are especially likely to do so. And

01:17:34.360 they note that in modern Western societies, we have this attitude towards people who are victimized

01:17:40.340 that they should be compensated and treated well and sympathized with. And people who are high on

01:17:48.840 the dark triad are very good at sort of monitoring their environment and looking at what strategies they 0.99

01:17:54.540 can execute to extract some kind of social or professional or sexual reward. And now more and more,

01:18:00.560 it's, you know, claiming the mantle of victimhood, which is, I mean, I guess it's, it's important to

01:18:05.220 be clear that it's not that people who are actually victimized are likely to score high on the dark

01:18:09.300 triad. It's that people high on the dark triad are very manipulative and aware that now pretending

01:18:15.300 like wearing the camouflage of victimhood can be advantageous. And, you know, it's, it's tricky as a

01:18:21.240 society because we want to sympathize with victims, but also we want to be aware of the dark triad types. 0.99

01:18:26.720 Okay. So that's, that's been well modeled by the game theorists. So if you have a group of

01:18:34.020 cooperators, so let's say they're agreeable and they are sympathetic to the, I don't want to say

01:18:41.760 victimized. I want to say to the, to the hurt and, and the sick, the hurt and the infantile,

01:18:49.400 right? The agreeable cooperators will attend to the, the sick, the elderly and the infantile,

01:18:59.560 right? Then you could think they're the ones who are genuinely in need. They're also the ones for

01:19:06.240 whom provision of help is advantageous. So now imagine you have a group of those people together

01:19:14.040 and they're all cooperating. They do just fine. But if you throw one psychopath into the equation,

01:19:20.540 he takes everything, right? And so, so this has been modeled out very well is that the pathology

01:19:26.280 of agreeableness is that it's, it's indefinitely open to subversion, right? And so you need,

01:19:35.620 that's why you need, and, and of course the psychopathic types, the narcissists, they know

01:19:39.920 this perfectly well, especially the cluster B types, because they're absolutely willing to

01:19:45.160 proclaim victim status as loudly as it can possibly be proclaimed on any dimension whatsoever

01:19:53.140 to gain an advantage, to gain the upper hand practically. But see, the moral upper hand,

01:19:59.600 I think the right way to think about this is that there isn't anything more valuable than reputation,

01:20:05.760 right? Because there's no difference between reputation, there's no difference between

01:20:11.400 reputation and wealth fundamentally. I mean, even monetary wealth is a form of abstracted reputation.

01:20:18.140 So, you know, it's just being tokenized essentially, like money's, money's tokenization of reputation.

01:20:24.440 While the problem is, is reputation can be gamed. And we know too, that young women are much more 1.00

01:20:29.920 likely to fall for the dark tetrad types because they mimic, they mimic reputation.

01:20:36.380 Yeah.

01:20:36.740 That's their game.

01:20:37.640 And confidence and competence.

01:20:39.880 Yeah.

01:20:40.200 Yeah.

01:20:41.040 Yeah.

01:20:41.600 They have the confidence of the competent without the competence.

01:20:45.600 Yes. I mean, it's, it's, that's, yeah, people value, especially more and more now. I mean,

01:20:51.060 this is a, the discussion around cancel culture and mobbing and all of these things. I mean,

01:20:57.220 people treat it like it's unserious, but people care deeply about how they're viewed in the eyes

01:21:01.400 of others and social esteem. And I remember there was a study a few years ago that I read about,

01:21:05.640 um, uh, this came out in, in 2017. Roy Baumeister was an author on this paper. I don't recall

01:21:12.220 everyone, uh, on here, but they basically found that, you know, they looked at the world value survey

01:21:17.160 and pulled out certain items and found that right next to physical safety, uh, reputation was the second

01:21:24.900 priority, uh, for people. And they found, I mean, it was interesting. Some of the studies that they

01:21:29.940 did where they gave forced choice questions to participants in a, in a separate study in this

01:21:34.940 paper, where they asked people essentially, you know, would you rather have a body part amputated

01:21:39.780 or be known as a Nazi or be known as a pedophile? And most of the participants said they would rather

01:21:47.020 lose an arm or a leg than be known as something so vile as, you know, a pedophile or a Nazi. I mean,

01:21:52.360 people care deeply about, about these things. And so dark triad types are aware of this. They know 1.00

01:21:58.760 how to target people's reputations and form mobs. And I mean, I'm really interested just all of the

01:22:03.060 sort of the correlates of the dark tetrad, dark triad, these traits, one of them is age. You're

01:22:10.880 probably aware of this, Dr. Peterson, that there's an inverse correlation between age and scores in the

01:22:15.380 dark tetrad such that younger adults score higher on these traits than older adults.

01:22:22.020 And yet we have this situation more and more in society and on college campuses and elsewhere

01:22:28.280 where older adults are abdicating their responsibility and letting young adults who

01:22:34.480 disproportionate number of them would actually qualify for clinical levels of psychopathy and

01:22:39.920 narcissism. But generally speaking, they score higher than average on, on those scales anyway.

01:22:44.660 And, you know, just a large share of them are eager for power, for influence, for wealth,

01:22:52.140 and they're willing to do whatever they can and take whatever maneuvers possible.

01:22:57.260 Well, I think there's something also that's even more ominous going on, Rob, because, so the

01:23:04.820 typical psychopath, historically speaking, was a wanderer, right? An itinerant. You know,

01:23:13.660 and that's a trope from every bloody horror movie you can possibly imagine. You know, the itinerant

01:23:19.860 serial killer, for example. Well, why do you have to be itinerant? Well, it's because if you live in a

01:23:26.840 closed community and you screw people over, then your reputation gets around, like, instantly and

01:23:35.180 people are unbelievably good at tracking cheating. Like, there's, there's some evidence we have an

01:23:39.880 evolved module for remembering cheaters. Like, it's a major deal. Cheater detection module. So, you have

01:23:44.860 to go, exactly, exactly. You have to go find new victims. Okay, and so you, and you do that, you

01:23:51.380 essentially do that by hiding. You camouflage yourself, right, as, as a new person. Okay, so,

01:23:56.840 now you might say, well, we've invented a whole new world. It's a virtual world.

01:24:02.520 Well, the thing, I think virtualization enables the psychopaths because you can't do reputation

01:24:08.140 tracking. Yeah. And God only knows how dangerous that is. It's happening online, of course. It's

01:24:14.920 happening even in, in, in the real world. You know, I know we touched on this in our, in the last time

01:24:19.860 you and I spoke on your show about dating apps, but one of the things that those things allow for,

01:24:24.740 you know, it's, it's an online platform, but it allows people to meet in real life,

01:24:30.220 is that now dark triad types, dark tetrad types are able to essentially have multiple partners in

01:24:39.200 non-overlapping social circles. So, in the past, if you wanted to sleep around, word would get out

01:24:44.080 and you'd develop a reputation as a scoundrel or a philanderer or so on. Whereas now you can have

01:24:50.420 multiple different partners who don't know one another, who aren't a member of your social circle.

01:24:55.420 They are not members of one another's social circles, and none of them are aware of what's

01:25:00.540 going on. And this allows psychopathic types to indulge their appetites with no penalties,

01:25:07.840 no reputational penalties. Probably also generates it even worse, right? Because,

01:25:14.400 well, because you could imagine, imagine the borderline cases. So, and those would even be

01:25:18.640 young men to some degree, because they're tilted more in the narcissistic and psychopathic direction. 0.75

01:25:23.040 And that would also be a consequence of incomplete cortical maturation. Now, the problem with,

01:25:30.480 the problem with the, what would you say, consequence-free dating is that there's no price

01:25:37.160 to be paid for your philandering. And now, so then the question is, what do you become if you

01:25:42.620 practice predatory sexuality? And the answer is, well, clearly you become, you tilt yourself in the

01:25:48.260 psychopathic direction, because what you're doing technically is deriving immediate gratification

01:25:54.620 with no reputational or practical responsibility. And the people who are advertising for hedonism,

01:26:02.620 see, I just watched Cabaret. Have you watched the movie Cabaret?

01:26:06.240 I haven't seen it.

01:26:08.060 Okay. I would highly recommend it. It's about the Weimar Republic in Germany. And it's about

01:26:13.920 a cabaret. It's about a young woman who's a cluster B type, who wants to be a movie actress, 1.00

01:26:21.580 who's running down the hedonistic road at a cabaret. And she's quite promiscuous and deluded and clueless. 1.00

01:26:31.400 And she has her little coterie of followers. And she performs at a cabaret. And like many cluster B 0.86

01:26:38.820 people, especially the histrionic types, she's got a certain degree of artistic talent. And that goes

01:26:43.900 along with that fluidity of identity, you know, because artists are shape changers, obviously. And so,

01:26:50.540 anyways, the movie tracks her descent along with people she more or less pulls along with her.

01:26:59.500 But what's very interesting about it is that the director does a brilliant job of this, is that

01:27:03.860 the Nazis are in the background constantly, right? So there's this immense tension between this hedonism,

01:27:10.760 this unbridled, hedonistic, short-term lifestyle that's hypothetically free and enlightened,

01:27:20.660 like the luxury belief types, and the Nazis who are waiting in the wing. And I've been trying to

01:27:26.260 puzzle this out conceptually. So imagine that a large proportion of the population devolves towards

01:27:32.880 impulsive sensuality. Okay? It's a responsibility-less mode of being. Okay?

01:27:39.880 But as your book indicates, things fall apart because of that. Well, when things fall apart,

01:27:46.880 there's an unconscious clamor for the tyrant, right? So you get this hedonism, tyranny dynamic.

01:27:57.120 Now, you see the same thing in the movie Pinocchio. You remember in Pinocchio, the delinquent boys go to

01:28:04.200 Pleasure Island, right? But underneath are the slavers who turn them into braying jackasses. 0.99

01:28:11.200 It's the same. And that movie was put out, by the way, just before the Second World War, right? 0.73

01:28:17.620 So they had their finger on the pulse. But so there's this insistence in classic stories that

01:28:26.200 hedonism and tyranny go hand in hand, right? It's bread and circuses to some degree in the Roman

01:28:32.480 emperors, right? But it's deeper than that. It's that if the entire population insists upon

01:28:39.320 maintaining immaturity and the hedonistic gratification that goes along with that,

01:28:44.540 there will inevitably be a corresponding demand from the unconscious to elevate the figure of the

01:28:51.080 missing authority figure, right? The missing authority to maintain order.

01:28:57.100 I read this study, I think he's a Danish psychologist, Michael Beng Peterson and some of

01:29:03.300 his co-authors. The study was on populism. And what he found was that it was a study on populism,

01:29:10.820 on status. They had a variety of different measures. But one of the things the study concluded,

01:29:16.040 they had measures of the need for social status, the desire for dominance, the proclivity to be

01:29:23.580 interested in populism. And he found this inverse correlation between the drive for status and the

01:29:29.720 interest in populism. And what he basically concluded, him and his co-authors, was that people

01:29:35.640 who support populism, they themselves aren't actually that interested in status. What they want is a strong

01:29:40.460 leader. They are not interested in ascending to those high positions in society. They would rather

01:29:45.640 just elect a strong man to implement their preferences while they can go about their business

01:29:50.460 and live their lives. And they're not that interested in getting involved in influential political and

01:29:55.360 cultural roles. Whereas people who are very opposed to populism have a strong desire for status and they

01:30:02.860 don't like the idea of a strong man. They themselves want to be the influential leader or the person who gets

01:30:09.220 to call the shots. And they don't like the idea of the strong man. And I'm thinking about what you're

01:30:13.340 describing, that the kinds of people who are tilting more and more towards populism, they're looking at

01:30:19.300 their lives and they're not seeing their preferences and values reflected in the communities around them

01:30:25.520 of families deteriorating and community suffering and people out of work and jobless and addicted to

01:30:31.640 drugs and so on. And maybe they themselves aren't interested in a political career. But if they hear

01:30:36.020 someone say how they're going to fix things and clean things up, they'll vote for that person. 0.75

01:30:41.440 Meanwhile, the upper segment of society who, when they look around, they see an environment of

01:30:48.040 relative order and cleanliness and people who are doing well for themselves and highly educated and

01:30:52.620 well-off, they don't see the need for a strong man leader. And many of the people who are in those

01:30:58.700 sort of gated and safe areas, they themselves are interested in influential positions in society.

01:31:04.600 Right. Well, okay. So you'd have to differentiate that further, eh? Because

01:31:10.280 then you could differentiate the populist admirers into two camps. There'd be those that are looking

01:31:18.900 to, those who are generally concerned with the emergence of disorder and who don't know what to

01:31:25.180 do about it. And then there'd be those who want to abdicate all responsibility for self-governance to a

01:31:32.720 centralized authority. Hmm. Interesting. Right. Exactly. Now on the wealthy side, you'd have the

01:31:38.720 same kind of division. You'd have the people who genuinely want to take responsibility for the

01:31:45.760 political and those who are opposed to populists because that's competition for their psychopathic

01:31:52.760 power seeking. Yes. Yes. That sounds right. Yeah. So there's a sort of a benevolent and malevolent

01:31:58.980 side of both of those. Both. Yes, exactly. Well, you know, I haven't seen any psychological research

01:32:05.940 pertaining to the relationship between impulsive hedonism and admiration for more authoritarian

01:32:15.320 beliefs. Hmm. I haven't seen any research on that either. It'd be very interesting to see that tested.

01:32:19.580 No, I've seen nothing. I've seen nothing like that, right? Because, and that's, well, there's lots of

01:32:24.500 things that psychologists do a very bad job of studying. And certainly left-wing authoritarianism

01:32:28.680 is like very high up there on the list. And so the other thing I was curious about, something you said

01:32:34.080 earlier, you know, that I've really been struck in recent years by the willingness of the left in

01:32:41.080 particular. And these are the leftists who I think are part of the camp that you described as the elitists

01:32:47.400 who want it all, right? They're very willing to sacrifice the poor to their hypothetical ideals,

01:32:54.880 right? And so I've also seen no research at all. Like, I'm very curious to know if the, what the, what the

01:33:03.420 cloud of meaning around these so-called luxury beliefs might be. You know, because one of the things I've

01:33:08.840 really seen happen in Europe, it's really an appalling thing to watch, is that the very people who once, so these 0.68

01:33:15.340 people on the left, who once were hypothetically on the side of the economically oppressed, are

01:33:22.480 absolutely 100% willing to implement policies that will demolish the poor in the service of their 0.99

01:33:31.860 utopian and self-aggrandizing beliefs. You know, and you pointed out some mechanisms there. It's like,

01:33:38.560 well, what does it cost an elite young woman who's at Yale and who's highly likely, let's say she's 0.64

01:33:45.980 above average in attractiveness. You know, she's bright. She comes from a family that's doing well.

01:33:52.840 She's intelligent. She's going to get married. It costs her nothing to claim that her compassion is

01:34:01.820 so overwhelming that she's willing to accept anyone's disgraceful behavior in principle. It

01:34:07.800 costs her absolutely nothing. The price is definitely paid by the truly poor. And it does

01:34:13.960 happen from the bottom up, right? And you know why? Because the farther down you go in a hierarchy of

01:34:20.640 status and reputation, the more stress there is. Yes.

01:34:24.660 And so if you increase the amount of chaos, you knock off the bottom people. And that does account

01:34:30.760 for that cascade that you described earlier, is that fatherlessness emerged first in the black

01:34:37.040 community and then spread very, very widely. And then exactly the same thing started to happen in the

01:34:42.540 Hispanic community from the bottom of the economic hierarchy upward. Then it started to happen in the

01:34:48.760 Caucasian population. But the endpoint appears, if you just map out the trends, the endpoint appears

01:34:58.360 that there will be fewer and fewer people in stable relationships. I mean, it's happening at an

01:35:05.840 incredibly, but the people that are in those relationships, they pay no price whatsoever for

01:35:11.320 expanding their tolerance to include all forms of behavior that actually work to undermine that

01:35:18.200 necessary stability. And they won't even admit that this, it's like they just call that, that's just

01:35:22.720 called, well, that's your arbitrary moral judgment. All families are equal. And that's another place

01:35:28.280 where you undoubtedly got in trouble with your book. So maybe we could close with this because

01:35:32.560 one of the things you do that's quite striking in your book is, and I think this is where we'll take

01:35:38.320 the conversation for everyone watching and listening. I think this is where we'll continue the

01:35:41.560 conversation on the Daily Wire side. You are a poster boy, so to speak, for the utility of pursuing higher

01:35:50.900 education. You've had quite marked success, partly because you did, you had skills and abilities that

01:35:57.740 weren't exhausted by the situations that you found yourself in, even within the military. And you got

01:36:04.440 access to higher education and you're, you have likely, you have a pretty decent academic future

01:36:11.240 ahead of you by the looks of things. But you make the case very clearly that as far as you're concerned

01:36:16.640 and from what you've observed, that education is no substitute for stability of family. So why don't you

01:36:27.040 talk about that for a bit and then, and then we'll, and then we'll bring this to a, to a close.

01:36:31.380 Well, we have this preoccupation with, so, so there's this question of how to achieve

01:36:40.260 more upward social mobility for kids in deprived and dysfunctional circumstances. And for the last

01:36:49.780 few decades, it's, it's, we've been focusing on education and college as the end all and be all

01:36:53.860 that if we could just get more kids to get more degrees and earn higher incomes and join the middle

01:36:59.780 class that that, that that's the mark of a successful society. And I make the claim as someone who has

01:37:08.540 done pretty well educationally, but had, you know, the very tumultuous experiences with different

01:37:17.780 families, um, that actually I think the family piece is more important than the education piece.

01:37:23.360 And even if we wanted more kids to go to college and to obtain degrees, we would, we would be more

01:37:31.240 effective in achieving that goal. If we looked at what happens before the age of 18, then what happens

01:37:37.220 after, if we looked at what's happening in children's home lives and their family lives. Um, so that's one

01:37:44.700 part of it. I mean, if you look at the predictors of going to college, one of them is having two parents

01:37:49.020 at home. That's one of the strongest predictors of going on to obtain a bachelor's degree. Uh, and so

01:37:53.340 even if the goal was bachelor's degrees, fine, but let's look at how to promote stable two-parent

01:37:58.300 homes. The other piece is, you know, when I think back to the guys I grew up with and the community I

01:38:05.060 lived in, and I had five close friends growing up. Two of them went to prison. I had one friend who was

01:38:11.480 shot and college may not have been the right path for those guys. College isn't the right path for

01:38:17.880 everyone. Um, but I do think, so, so maybe regardless of environment, wherever you put these

01:38:23.160 guys, um, I'm not entirely convinced that they would have gone on to achieve astounding educational

01:38:30.120 success. But I do think that if they had been in an environment where there was more family stability,

01:38:36.560 good role models, adults putting the needs of children before their own desires, they wouldn't

01:38:43.020 have been incarcerated. They wouldn't have gone to, they would, you know, they wouldn't have been shot

01:38:47.440 to death. So we may not be able to do much to raise the ceiling for a lot of kids, but I think we could

01:38:53.720 do more to raise the floor as far as how catastrophically down they could become versus we've been focusing

01:38:59.560 on the other side of it, which is how much more can we lift them up? You know, you're probably well

01:39:03.740 aware. Uh, I've, I've heard you, you know, I know, I know you're aware of the, the research on the

01:39:07.760 limitations of increasing intelligence and academic ability and those kinds of things.

01:39:11.020 There are hard limits to that. Um, but I don't think we've done enough to look at the other side

01:39:17.640 of, you know, we can actually prevent young boys, especially from incarceration, from being locked up.

01:39:26.560 One of the statistics I cite in the book is that only 3% of children in foster care graduate from

01:39:32.860 college, whereas 60% of boys in foster care are later incarcerated. And I, I mean, I don't know if

01:39:40.140 we can do a, I mean, we could probably do more to get more kids, uh, from those backgrounds into

01:39:44.980 universities, but we should also be focusing on how to prevent those kids from living in such 0.87

01:39:51.340 dysfunctional and deprived circumstances in the first place that lead them to, uh, jail and to prison.

01:39:57.720 And ultimately the book is a kind of implicit defensive family from an author who really

01:40:04.680 didn't have one, uh, and that we could be expanding our area of concern beyond just the educational.

01:40:11.580 Um, I'm grateful to have achieved the success that I have, and it's better than not having those things.

01:40:18.000 Um, but towards the end of the book, I, I do say that, um, you know, when I think back to the good

01:40:24.220 memories I had from my upbringing, um, yeah, I, I would trade all of it. I would trade all of the

01:40:30.920 educational credentials and accolades and so on to have just had a more sort of stable, normal,

01:40:34.980 conventional upbringing. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I think we'll delve into that a bit more.

01:40:42.860 Okay. Well, thank you very much. And, and for all of you watching and listening, that Troubled is

01:40:47.860 very interesting book. And I think it, it gets the meta story, right. Um, we've wrestled with this

01:40:53.680 issue, for example, at this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship that I've been building with some other

01:40:58.280 people. And one of the more contentious streams of discussion we've had was with regard to family

01:41:03.960 policy. And we settled on the agreement, hard fought, that the nuclear family is the minimal ideal

01:41:13.580 that can sustain society. It might not be sufficient. Even there's a lot of stress on nuclear families. 0.91

01:41:20.920 It might not be enough, but once you fragment below nuclear family, you're, you're playing with, 0.85

01:41:27.720 you're playing with fire. You're playing with serious fire, you know, and there's a dark side

01:41:31.740 too, to that. Another dark side to that, um, luxury belief thing, you know, it's like,

01:41:36.520 you might want to think that people want wealth for comfort and opportunity, but they also want wealth

01:41:44.400 for comparative status. And it's, it's very much advantageous for the psychopathic wealthy to ensure

01:41:55.120 that the fragmented masses are so chaotic that they don't get to have what the rich have, right.

01:42:03.760 Because a lot of status is having something that someone else doesn't have. It's not the same as

01:42:09.280 wealth, right. And so the real psychopath types, well, you know, there is literature showing a

01:42:16.260 relationship between the dark tetrad. And so imagine this is, you can imagine a situation where you,

01:42:23.360 here's the deal. You can have your salary doubled, but your friends have their salaries tripled.

01:42:28.320 Right. Right. Or you can, you can, and you can contrast that against relative deprivation

01:42:35.540 conditions where your relative status is elevated at the cost of other people's wellbeing. Well,

01:42:42.200 the psychopathic narcissist types will pick the elevation of relative status at the cost of other

01:42:47.820 people. And I think that's why they spend so much time looking upward, right? Like I think that

01:42:52.760 there's a, it's very interesting that, uh, eat the rich is a more popular slogan than feed the poor.

01:43:00.340 Right. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Because it is about that relative. And the people who say eat the rich tend

01:43:05.380 to be people who, maybe they're not in the 1%, but they're in the top 10%. Yeah. And the people who

01:43:10.680 are the most strident about oppressor, oppressed dichotomies and so on, they're not the people at the

01:43:16.400 bottom. They are people who are just, just below the top. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and they, and it's

01:43:23.220 eat the rich is a lie. It's eat the competent. That's really what they mean. Yeah. Yeah. And that's,

01:43:28.420 that's the real man. That's the real railing cry of the, of the real narcissistic psychopath. It's like 0.99

01:43:33.080 devour the competent. And, and, you know, when you say, if I say to someone who's competent,

01:43:38.400 you just got everything you have by stealing it, that means it's perfectly, not only is legitimate

01:43:45.400 for me to steal it, if I'm oppressed, it's actually morally obligatory for me to steal it. Right. That's

01:43:51.280 a very dangerous situation. That's exactly what was set up in the early Soviet union. Exactly that. 0.88

01:43:57.040 And the psychopaths came out of the woodwork, man. And they just turned that whole society into hell. 0.97

01:44:01.980 Yeah. Yeah. Same thing in Maoist China and, and, uh, the Cambodian genocide. I mean, if you want,

01:44:07.760 like, I mean, the, you know, this kind of year off top, but the, the, the Cambodian genocide is

01:44:11.660 fascinating because they basically speed ran communism and compressed all the horrors of

01:44:15.920 the Soviet union into about three years. And they killed a third of the country's population. 0.92

01:44:20.540 Um, horrifying. I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's absurd that we don't have more education around

01:44:26.400 what happened in communist societies, but that's, yeah, an aside. It, it, it is, it is quite,

01:44:31.100 it is quite the stunning miracle of stupidity. That's for sure. All right, sir. Well, 1.00

01:44:35.940 thank you to everyone watching and listening at this discussion today. I'm going to continue

01:44:39.800 to talk to Rob on the daily wire side. Um, I think we'll delve into slightly more personal

01:44:45.420 matters on that side, because I'm, I'm curious to find out, well, I'm curious to talk a little

01:44:50.120 bit more about research hypotheses. Um, since I don't have the opportunity to do that much

01:44:54.600 now that I'm no longer working for a university. Um, but I'm also curious about finding out a little

01:45:01.300 bit more about what you think the lasting effects for you have been as a consequence of being

01:45:07.280 raised in an environment where relationships, long-term relationships were tenuous to say the

01:45:13.680 least. Um, so let's, so that's what we're going to do on the, on the, on the daily wire side. So

01:45:18.400 you guys are welcome to join us for that. And thank you very much, Rob. It's a pleasure talking

01:45:22.320 to you. I'm glad to hear that despite the fact that you don't get to do a book tour that

01:45:26.660 at least not to bookstores that your book is doing well. And I think it'll continue to do well. So

01:45:31.180 would, and hopefully this podcast will help to some degree for that. And, uh, everybody watching,

01:45:37.540 listening, thank you very much for your time and attention and to the daily wire plus people for

01:45:41.240 making this possible. That's also much appreciated. Good to talk to you. Thank you, Dr. Peterson. It's a

01:45:46.640 pleasure.

01:45:56.660 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 07, 2024

429. The Psychology of Social Status and Class ｜ Rob Henderson

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