My Chat with Dr. Rob Henderson, Bestselling Author of the Memoir ＂Troubled＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_653)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 4 minutes
Words per Minute
185.01282
Summary
In this episode, Gadsad speaks with Dr. Rob Henderson, who recently completed his PhD in Psychology at Cambridge University, about his difficult childhood growing up in foster care, family, and social class. Dr. Henderson's book, "Troubled: A Memoir of My Difficult Childhood, Growing up in Foster Care, and Finding My True Identity," details his experiences with foster care and family life growing up.
Transcript
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Hi, everybody. This is Gadsad for The Sad Truth. Today, I have another fantastic guest.
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I should introduce him as Dr. Rob Henderson because he recently completed his PhD in
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psychology at Cambridge University. Rob, how are you doing?
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I'm good, Gadsad. Good. It's great to be here. How are you?
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Like, I'm doing great. I want to read you. So your book came out a few weeks ago. Let
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me just make sure I get the full title right. It's a memoir of your difficult, you know,
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childhood growing up. Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class. And
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we'll get into all of that. Maybe you can give us just a, you know, two, three, four, as long
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as you want, but a quick synopsis of your journey, and then we'll drill down various points that
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we think might be worthy of exploring further. Yeah, sure. So, you know, the book covers my
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unusual and indirect path to higher education. You know, you mentioned I received a PhD about
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a little over a year ago from Cambridge. Before that, I was at Yale. But, you know, before entering
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these universities and receiving these degrees, my life was a lot different. I was born into
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poverty in Los Angeles. And my mother, she became heavily addicted to drugs. I never knew who my
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father was. And, you know, my mom and I, for a time, we were homeless. We lived in a car. Eventually,
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we settled in this slum apartment in LA. And, you know, my mother was just not in a position to care
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for me. And I was put into the LA County foster care system when I was three and spent the next
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five, just shy of five years living in seven different foster homes. And I detail those
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experiences in the book and how upsetting and destabilizing that was for me. I was adopted
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into this working class family just before my eighth birthday. And we settled in this kind of dusty
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blue collar town in Northern California called Red Bluff. And for a time, I had some stability
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there. But my parents separated shortly thereafter. And my adoptive father, who I had grown pretty close
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with over the course of about 18 months, he was extremely upset with my mother for leaving him.
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And as a way to retaliate at her, decided to cut off contact with me. And this was, you know,
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I talk about it in the book, how stressful and unexpected this was for me as a nine year old
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kid and how, you know, after never knowing my father, and then all of the foster homes, and then
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having a father and then not having one. And, you know, so there's more to this story, more sort of
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separations and reunions with my mother fell in love with a woman. And then there was some financial
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catastrophe and family tragedies. And they later later separated. And so by the time I was 17, I was
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very ready to flee and get out of there as soon as I could. So I enlisted in the US Air Force when I
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was 17. And from there, with some hiccups and some setbacks, I did manage to turn my life around
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and went to Yale on the GI Bill, and then off to Cambridge on scholarship. And so the book describes
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these experiences, I talk about how stunned I was when I arrived at Yale in 2015, and how unprepared I
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was not just for the economic divides between the way I had grown up and the way that many of these
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students had been raised in terms of just material affluence and wealth, but also the stark differences
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in terms of family background, stability, personal experiences, sociopolitical opinions, I talk about
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this term I've popularized called luxury beliefs, I coined that term later in grad school, which has
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kind of entered the lexicon and taken on a life of its own. But yeah, that's the short version, my mother
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came to the US as a young woman from Korea. So she came to us from Seoul. And so I grew up knowing that part
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of my family background, I never knew who my father was. To this day, I have no idea. But I took a 23
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me genetic ancestry test last year, and discovered that I'm half Hispanic on my father's side. And so now
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Gad, what I tell people is that I went to bed white adjacent, and I woke up as an underrepresented
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minority. And I wish I had known that bit of information when I was applying for college and
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for graduate school. But I didn't. And so that's, that's the story in a nutshell, but I'm happy to
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Well, that's a perfect summary, because I was I'm familiar with the general arc of your story. And I
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think you've summarized it well. So I guess the first question out some of these questions, I know the
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answer to them, but our listeners don't. So I'm asking it from the perspective of trying to elucidate
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your story to our listeners, not necessarily to for myself, obviously. You've not ever spoken to
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your mother since last seeing her, and you've never met your biological father. Is there any ever in
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the in the dark recesses of your mind when you're in the privacy of your thoughts? Are there any,
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maybe fantasies is too strong a word, but any desire to ever meet them again? I understand they
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abandoned you. I understand that they obviously didn't care enough at the right times of your
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life to to to pay attention to you. But is there sort of a, for lack of a better term, I mean,
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the Christian thing of, you know, kind of infinite forgiveness, and let's maybe we can reunite now
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Um, well, you know, I'm, I'm not a particularly religious person. And, uh, you know, I, I, I, I
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think, you know, I, I admire the ideal of forgiveness. I don't think I have that in me. Um, I have no
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desire to reconnect with people who, um, would be willing to, you know, be that neglectful and, you know,
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not prioritize the needs of, of their kids. Um, so yeah, I've never really had that strong desire,
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uh, to reconnect, um, ever really. Uh, it's just not, um, an impulse that I really understand. I,
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I, I think, you know, I've, I've spoken with other adoptees before and some of them have more sort of
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complex stories where they were close with their family for a time, but all of my memories, you know,
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I, I talk about the earliest memories I have with my mother at three years old, you know, it's
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essentially me being taken from her by police and then seeing her in handcuffs. And those are the
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earliest memories, the only memories of her. I have, I have these kinds of flashbulb memories of
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living in a car, but that's it. Um, I have no fond memories with her, um, which may to some extent
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explain why I feel, um, no warmth, uh, toward her and, and certainly not to my father who I've never
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met. Okay. That might explain, I mean, and it's perfectly reasonable and plausible for you to not
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want to, you know, reconcile with them, but let's push it further. And obviously we, we both studied
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psychology, so it's coming from that perspective. Um, is there, let's suppose that you could find out
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about both your biological parents. Would it give you any sense of schadenfreude to know that their
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life is miserable and they suck? Or would you be along the same lines? Would you be terribly upset
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if you found out that your dad is now married? He's got four children. He's dad of the year,
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seven years in a row in, uh, important Oregon. And your mom has become this great woman with a
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wonderful family too. Would that, or, you know, they always say that the worst, the worst thing for
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someone is when you're indifferent to someone, that's the ultimate sort of, you, you don't care
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anymore. Or are you there or do you still have that, that ire within you? Um, yeah, I think I'm,
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I think I'm basically past it. Um, yeah, both of those scenarios, I, I don't think I would have a
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very strong response to it. And part of that I think that is just because my life is pretty good
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now. You know, if I was still, you know, living in poverty or squalor or in, um, you know, a less
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fortunate position in life, then maybe I would hang on more to those resentments and grudges.
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Um, some of that schadenfreude or some of that anger, if I, you know, if their lives were, uh,
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um, you know, looking rosy, but, um, you know, I don't really feel, feel anything either way for
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them. You know, I, I was curious, part of the reason why I took that genetic ancestry test last
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year was because, you know, eventually, you know, at age, I was 33 to finally decide, okay, you know,
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let's, let's see what, what that side of my family is, looks like in terms of ethnicity. I was
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curious too, about potential, um, you know, now, now that I'm getting to the age where, you know,
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I'm considering, um, you know, eventually starting a family and having kids and those kinds of things.
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Like, you know, I was, I was curious about genetic propensities and did I have any, um, concerns there
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or, or should I have, you know, and, and there was nothing there, fortunately. Um, and so,
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you know, I guess in a pragmatic sense, I would be curious. Um, but otherwise, no,
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in terms of sort of personal connection, anything like that, there was a time actually, I remember
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once my adoptive mother, so a lot of the information I have now and that I described
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in the book came from a file my adoptive mother gave me, um, when I left home after I became an
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adult and, you know, contains documents and information from social workers and forensic
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psychologists and teachers and people involved in my case when I was in the foster system.
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And, uh, I learned that my, um, grandfather, my mother's father, uh, was a former police detective
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who started a fertilizer company in Seoul and became relatively wealthy. And so, you know,
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I remember I told some of my friends about this and we were like, you know, that would be cool.
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Reunite with a rich grandpa, something like that.
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But, uh, yeah, well, he, I mean, he, he was as of, you know, this was, you know, uh, 20 plus years
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ago, 25 years ago, but, um, now, you know, I don't even know if he's still alive at this point,
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but you know, that, you know, there was a time where I thought, you know, that might be a cool
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Well, when you, I mean, I'm going to come back to your adoptive parents in a second, but you,
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you kind of gave a segue to a question that I was planning on asking later about your future,
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likely, you know, your family, you said, Oh, I'm, you know, I'm at an age where I'm starting
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Do you think that your, and here it's, of course it's speculative, only time will tell,
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but do you think that the experiences that you've gone through, the very difficult experiences
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you've gone through are going to uniquely inform your parenting style and that you will
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Uh, I had really neglect, I mean, to put it mildly, neglectful parents, and I'm going to
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orgiastically go to the other end of that continuum and maybe be overly doting or make
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sure that I don't make, do you get, do you think about that?
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Do you worry that you may repeat some of those patterns or what's your thought about your
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Um, you know, I, I, I don't think it would, it would be very hard to do worse than my parents.
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Um, but I, I guess it has made me think about things in a different way.
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Um, both my personal experiences and then my read of, you know, the, the research in
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personality and intelligence and all of the psychological attributes, you know, that there
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is that kind of standard line in behavioral genetics of parenting doesn't matter as much
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And I'm convinced I'm persuaded of that in terms of those kinds of measurable psychological
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traits that we tend to care about personality and intelligence and so on temperament and
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Uh, but I don't really care that much about those things.
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Um, you know, I care more about whether my child feels loved and supported and regardless
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of whatever their IQ is going to be in 20 years in the moment right now, how do they feel?
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Because that's what I spent a lot of time, um, thinking about when I was a kid and those
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feelings resurfaced as I was writing the book was, you know, we know this kid that we're
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reading about in this book is going to, you know, be a pretty successful person someday,
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I didn't know that that was what my life was going to be.
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All I knew was how I felt in the moment, the adults around me, um, feeling unnoticed or
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And so as long as my kid doesn't feel those things, um, you know, that, that will be a
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priority for me, uh, even more so than, um, attaining the conventional badges of success
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that a lot of kind of upper middle class, upper class people tend to, uh, be preoccupied
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I think I'll be a decent parent, um, equipped with all of this knowledge, but you know, I
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have noticed, you know, so my girlfriend, she was raised by a very stable family and that
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Like if, as long as one of the people in this pairing had a normal childhood, that was
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very important to me because if both of us came from kind of screwed up backgrounds, that
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would, you know, dramatically, I think, increase the possibility that these kids might not have
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great, um, you know, great upbringing, but you know, I'll, I'll defer to her judgment on
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Well, you, you raised, I listened to one of your chats.
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I think it was maybe the C-SPAN one, uh, where you raised, uh, and obviously it shows that
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you, you, you know, you've, you've trained in psychology because you, you, you differentiated
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between sort of two childhood stressors, one being, you know, scarcity and harshness
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And if I remember correctly, and I agree with it, uh, it was much more the instability that
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had the negative downstream effects that you might expect.
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It wasn't so much, so if you were raised in a economically deprived environment, but
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you do have those stable parents that you're talking about, where there's that strong sense
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of belongingness, love, nurturance, but yet we don't have that many calories on the dining
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That's a lot better environment than I live in the right zip code, but I've got really
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That, yeah, I've, I've seen several papers on this, uh, and yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty
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It's pretty, I've seen some papers with a kind of tenuous link between childhood harshness
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and detrimental outcomes, but you know, the correlation coefficients are always extremely
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low, you know, often insignificant, but there is a pretty strong and reliable connection
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between instability and those detrimental outcomes, even when you control for childhood, um, harshness
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So, you know, the, the kind of somewhat simplified punchline would be that growing up poor doesn't
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have the same effect as living in disorder or chaos.
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Um, and yeah, even, I, you know, even if you, um, cause I, I have seen these studies where
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they've looked specifically at children in wealthy homes, you know, wealthy meaning sort
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And these children have, um, you know, who, who are in highly unstable, um, home lives,
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they often later go on to have difficulties with addiction and substance abuse and self
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And so, you know, I think it, it can be, uh, powerful enough sort of severe instability
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is, you know, I think it's evolutionarily novel, you know, like poverty was the default
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for humanity for eons, but, you know, being raised in, um, by, by 10 different people,
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you know, nine of whom you'll never see again, that is, uh, kind of a novel environment.
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And I think our brains aren't equipped to handle something like that, especially as a
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young child, when the cement hasn't dried and you're still developing and so on.
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And so, you know, that was something I struggled with, with this book, Gad is like, you know,
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when I hear stories like, you know, frankly, like yours and the way that you grew up,
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people like Yomi Park, people who've had extreme, um, you know, uh, in war torn countries or in
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And then I'm writing about my kind of, you know, these difficult, uh, difficulties I experienced
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I'm like, you know, it's, it was hard, but it wasn't like I was, you know, running for my
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But I think the difference is that like, when people hear about surviving civil wars and
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political upheavals and totalitarian regimes, you go into it expecting that.
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Um, whereas when you read about a kid in foster care, I don't think people expect it to be
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quite, um, as, uh, dire, uh, as it actually is.
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There's that sort of mismatch between, um, expectations versus, versus the reality, um, that
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I think actually does surprise a lot of people, um, when they read about the foster care system,
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whether it's my story or other people who've lived through, um, that kind of disorder.
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I think the instability, uh, stressor, I mean, you're, you, you, the way you've, you're sort
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I had to go to many different homes and that results in a lot of obvious instability.
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But even within a singular quote, stable family, where it's the same family, the parenting style
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can introduce itself a form of instability or not.
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So for example, if a child understands clearly the schedule of reinforcement of punishments
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and rewards, if you do a, you'll get B and that will be a recurring causal link.
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If you do X, there'll be Y that environment is psychologically, you know, much healthier
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Then if I don't know when I'm going to get the whack or the cigarette, but because, because
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the fact that you might come home drunk and you've had a bad day, even though I tell you,
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So even, so that argument of instability applies at many layers.
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It applies at the grand layer that you're talking about instability that I don't know
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where I'm sleeping tonight, but it even applies within the stable unit of the parents that
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If their parenting style is not stable, that results in negative downstream effects.
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I mean, and, and those kinds of patterns are more pronounced, I think in, in sort of low
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income families in single parent, unmarried parents, um, simply because when, when there's
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one adult versus two, there's just that much more added stress and more sort of emotional
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Um, you know, there were a couple of stories I left on the cutting room floor of my book.
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I can tell you about, um, that I, yeah, I ended up taking these out, but one was that, um,
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my sister, uh, when we were kids, she was an extremely picky eater.
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My younger sister, she was my adoptive parents, biological daughter.
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And, you know, I, I remember shortly after my adoptive parents divorced, we would spend,
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you know, we'd spend one week with, uh, our mom and one week with her dad.
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And then eventually it was just me with the mom and my sister would, would come and stay
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Like my mom would work all day and then she would get home and she would be tired, but
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And my sister would, um, you know, she would complain and say, she would, you know, I want
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And my mom had just prepared a very nutritious meal for us.
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But oftentimes my mom would relent because she was extremely burned out.
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She was struggling to keep the home financially afloat and had other commitments and obligations
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But then later, um, when my mom entered a relationship with this woman named Shelly,
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um, my sister would still battle them relationship, right?
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And they raised my sister and I for a time and my sister would still battle them at the
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But this time they wouldn't relent because there were two adults present and they could negotiate
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And when you're stressed as an adult, having another adult present can keep your sanity when
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Um, it's just that much easier to have another adult who you can sort of lock eyes with and
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you both understand the situation you're in and help retain the sanity versus when you're
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alone with two kids, the stress just increases dramatically.
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I haven't looked at research on this about why there's an inverse correlation now for
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children, um, obesity and socioeconomic status, um, that, you know, poor kids in, in the U.S.
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and in other Western countries now are more likely to be overweight.
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And I think part of that is just when you're a single parent and you are faced with a kid,
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it's just easier to give them some candy and some cookies and some junk food and let them
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chill out while you, you know, have a, have a few minutes of peace.
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I think this is also perhaps why, um, you know, there was a study I recently saw that
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children in, um, homes that make less than $30,000 a year spent two hours more per day
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using screens than children from families that earn a hundred thousand dollars or more
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And again, I think part of this is, you know, screens didn't exist when I was a kid the way
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But I think a lot of this is, you know, you're a single parent and you're busy and you're
00:22:01.460
It's just easier to give your kid an iPad and put them in a corner and have some peace
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and quiet versus when you have two parents, you know, you have more time to negotiate
00:22:09.720
and, and find ways to occupy your child's time.
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And so I think like there are a lot of, um, different kinds of patterns, uh, around, uh,
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families that, that are overlooked, um, and the benefits of two parent families, which
00:22:24.800
Well, one of the, um, in listening to your C-SPAN chat, I think you mentioned at one point
00:22:29.720
that, you know, despite the fact that you were a, a, an average student at best, I think
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that might be a charitable, uh, uh, you know, uh, position on how you would do, I think it
00:22:45.960
So, uh, but you, you said that, you know, one of the things that kind of saved you is
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that you were actually someone who, who read a lot, who had a love for books.
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And I, I recently, I mean, this is something that I've mentioned endless number of times
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in all sorts of contexts about the importance of books.
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You know, the research shows that if, you know, one of the best predictors of your children's
00:23:07.060
It's something that came up in my recent chat with Elon Musk, where he's, he's a big lover
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of books and that, you know, he came to, to, to North America with a, you know, a suitcase
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And so, so do you ultimately think that, and the reason I'm asking this question is because
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to, to those young folks who might be, or even if they're not young to the folks who
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are, you know, uh, having a difficult time, uh, wrestling away their attention from, from
00:23:36.940
Uh, if you can't see around me here, I'm in my study, I'm surrounded.
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There are books in every little nook and cranny.
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And one of the things that stresses me the most in life is knowing how little I actually
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know, because I know how much there is out there and how many books there is yet for
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So do you really feel that one of the lights at the end of the tunnel for you was precisely
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that you had this love for books, which then led you to the higher education that you
00:24:07.220
Uh, yeah, I, I think there's, that definitely is a contributing factor.
00:24:13.120
Um, you know, once I learned to read, I mean, I, I taught myself to read, um, you know, I
00:24:19.460
was changing homes and changing schools so frequently that by the time I reached second
00:24:24.740
I barely knew the alphabet, but gradually had to learn and teach myself.
00:24:29.280
And once I, once it clicked for me, then I would visit the school library, I would read
00:24:34.140
books, you know, it was kind of a lifelong habit.
00:24:37.300
It would wax and wane depending on kind of factors at home and what was going on around
00:24:43.600
And I do think that played some non-trivial role in my success.
00:24:49.400
And, you know, I, a lot of my attitude around school, like formal education, you know, was,
00:24:54.980
was, you know, I, I didn't see the, the point of it.
00:25:03.420
Uh, it wasn't really a common ambition and, you know, I, I had some of that impulsivity
00:25:10.480
and, and some of that desire for thrill seeking and misadventure that I talk about in the book
00:25:15.380
And so I was still, um, curious though, you know, I, I, even, even at age maybe 15 or 16,
00:25:22.740
I would have scored high and need for cognition or something where I would read the textbooks.
00:25:30.520
But when it came to, you know, there was this rebellious streak too, where if the teachers
00:25:35.060
wanted me to do homework or wanted me to present a science project to the class or something
00:25:39.140
like that, I just would flat out refuse to do it.
00:25:42.020
And so as a result, I barely passed my classes.
00:25:44.920
And this is something else I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of people who, you know, think
00:25:48.620
that the education system will save us all or like it can, it can do a little bit, but
00:25:53.440
if a kid's home life is in shambles the way mine was, it doesn't matter how good the
00:25:58.500
My school was, you know, it was a decent public school, but the teachers did care.
00:26:01.600
Um, and I try to, uh, emphasize that in the book that the teachers were good at identifying
00:26:08.620
Um, and they would urge me to apply myself and they would ask me why I wasn't doing my
00:26:14.120
But, um, you know, that the rebelliousness combined with lack of oversight at home just,
00:26:20.620
But people will sometimes ask me, um, you know, if the reason why I became successful
00:26:29.360
was, you know, if it was kind of those innate attributes that, you know, was it, was it more
00:26:34.220
Um, and, you know, you know, genetics and propensities and those that will always play
00:26:45.680
But one point I hoped to make clear in the book was that, you know, being academically
00:26:50.260
inclined is necessary, but not sufficient to do well in school, where for me, the raw ingredients
00:26:55.780
were there, but, um, the early life experiences I'd had, the, um, lack of role models, um,
00:27:03.460
not having a father at home, all of these kinds of things collectively led to me barely
00:27:08.400
And it wasn't until I spent years out of that environment in the military, in a rigid structured
00:27:13.680
environment that equipped me with good habits and mentors and role models and all those things
00:27:18.240
that finally at age 25, I, you know, I finally thought, okay, maybe I could actually do this
00:27:22.860
college thing, but I had to leave home and be in that structured environment for eight
00:27:29.120
Um, and I was by far the most academically inclined of my friends.
00:27:32.780
None of my friends, uh, at my high school read for pleasure.
00:27:35.860
Um, you know, that, that would have been laughable to them to, to read books the way that I was.
00:27:40.560
Uh, so you mentioned, you know, Yonmi Park and myself and, you know, your story.
00:27:48.960
So I was asked, I am trying to think, I think it was in, when I was in the
00:27:52.840
when I was at UT Austin a few years ago, I was giving a couple of talks.
00:27:56.980
Uh, I actually tell that story in, in my latest book on happiness, uh, a student, I think he
00:28:02.580
was a student cause he was a young guy in the Q and a period said, you know, I'm summarizing
00:28:06.960
what he asked that, you know, you, you seem to have gone through, you know, very difficult
00:28:13.000
Uh, how is it that you can be successful and you always seem to be smiling and you love
00:28:18.500
life and you're happy and so on, which is one of the reasons why I actually wrote the
00:28:22.820
I had not intended, if you would have asked me when Parasitic Mind came out, you know,
00:28:28.840
I would be lying if I said, oh, my next book is going to be on happiness.
00:28:31.500
It's because a lot of people would ask me, what's your secret to happiness?
00:28:34.540
And as this, this individual said, you know, how, how is it that you've been able to turn
00:28:39.160
some of the very, very difficult childhood stressors that you faced, uh, into where you
00:28:46.540
And my answer, which I quote in full in the, in the, and the reason why I can quote it
00:28:51.360
verbatim is because the, the talk and the Q and a were taped.
00:28:54.440
So I can go back and literally quote the exact answer verbatim.
00:28:57.940
I basically said that the more difficulties I felt faced, not just from the Lebanese civil
00:29:05.740
war, which is about as horrifying as one can go through as a child, but you know, I never
00:29:11.480
have gone into this publicly, but I also didn't have the, you know, the most nurturing family
00:29:19.540
But each time you messed with me, my feeling, maybe that's just my combative nature.
00:29:25.940
It was, wait, I'm going to shove all of this hurt up your ass one day.
00:29:31.900
So there was this kind of chip on my shoulder that it didn't matter how much you didn't pay
00:29:38.760
You didn't notice my A straight, a cup, you know, uh, report card, my soccer accolades.
00:29:47.060
I was going to persevere irrespective of anything I faced.
00:29:51.340
Do you feel that your childhood difficulties actually ended up serving a positive, which
00:29:58.820
is because you face those stressors, it may, it's the old, so I have a quote that, forgive
00:30:04.580
my long-winded question and I'll turn, I'll turn the floor to you in a second.
00:30:07.700
In, in, uh, in the happiness book, I, I have a quote in the epigraph, uh, on resilience
00:30:17.020
So I have a quote by Seneca, which I'm going to paraphrase here.
00:30:20.760
He says that the strongest trees are those that have faced the greatest amount of wind
00:30:27.540
stressor, because by definition, they evolve the capacity to be well-rooted.
00:30:33.340
The trees that don't face a lot of wind stressors break very easily.
00:30:37.380
So in that sense, could it be that you are a strongly rooted tree precisely because of
00:30:47.000
Yeah, I'm, uh, I think that's a useful way to think about it, especially, you know, when
00:30:53.880
you're, when you're in the midst of disorder and struggle and stress to, um, believe that
00:31:02.540
it will make you stronger and, and maybe, you know, uh, a moderate amount of it probably
00:31:06.660
does, you know, I'm, I'm more or less persuaded by Jonathan Haidt and others who've been talking,
00:31:11.020
you know, the, the anxious generation and this thing that, you know, Gen Z and helicopter
00:31:14.880
parenting, this is not good for kids, but I certainly would never recommend the, the kind
00:31:22.460
of, uh, upbringing that I had, um, to become strong.
00:31:26.080
I think sometimes I think that I succeeded despite rather than because of my upbringing,
00:31:34.380
uh, because there were so many close calls and so many, um, moments where things could
00:31:41.260
have gone catastrophically wrong and just through luck and, you know, happenstance that they
00:31:47.220
Um, but you know, all that being said, I, I do have that, um, those early memories as, uh,
00:31:55.460
as a, as a refuge, whenever things get tough now, I can think, you know, at least I'm not,
00:32:00.500
you know, washing dishes for minimum wage and red bluff, um, you know, barely able to
00:32:05.200
cover rent and all the bills that I had, at least I'm not, you know, like there was, um,
00:32:09.940
even after I joined the military, I remember, um, I, I, I advanced very quickly in rank and
00:32:15.660
I was able to move off base when I was 19, which was very young.
00:32:18.940
Usually they like to keep the young guys on the military base to be monitored because they
00:32:22.600
know that young guys have a tendency to get into trouble misadventures, but I advanced
00:32:27.440
very quickly moved when I was 19 and, um, whatever little money I had saved, you know,
00:32:33.040
I got a house with my military buddies and I, you know, learned for the first time renting
00:32:37.820
a house, you have to pay the first month's rent, the last month's rent and a security
00:32:41.720
And I had this car that was having brake issues.
00:32:44.280
And so I drained my bank account and then I couldn't afford a belt.
00:32:48.340
And, and so, you know, I was embarrassed for a couple of weeks waiting for my next paycheck
00:32:52.300
that I couldn't even afford a belt to keep my pants up.
00:32:55.620
And now when things are tough, you know, I'm like, well, at least I have, well, now I
00:32:59.420
have two belts, but, you know, at least I have, you know, enough money to take care of
00:33:03.240
And I can never really feel like I can, I never feel, um, what, uh, um, you know, it
00:33:10.720
just, it would just seem so self-indulgent to complain about anything now.
00:33:16.000
Um, but yeah, I guess to your question, yeah, I think a bit of stress is, is necessary to
00:33:20.960
become strong, but I think at a certain point, at least in my life, it may have been too
00:33:28.620
That speaks to another thing that I talk about in the happiness book, which is the old maxim
00:33:33.840
that Aristotle taught us, which is, you know, everything in moderation, the golden mean,
00:33:38.600
So what you're basically saying is you don't have enough stressors.
00:33:44.040
You have too much stress, then maybe that, you know, you'll kill yourself, but there
00:33:48.180
is some moderate level of stress, which, which clearly you exceeded, but there is some moderate
00:33:53.640
level of stress that will probably be optimal for my future, uh, flourishing.
00:33:58.180
And to your point about you can contextualize anything that you're whining about today in
00:34:03.820
contra what you went through as a child, I actually use that exact mechanism because whenever
00:34:09.520
I'm down, let's say, you know, my, my latest book is out and I have to travel all over the
00:34:13.580
place and I'm kind of, uh, I'm pissed because I've got to go here and then I'll stop and
00:34:20.260
Because a bunch of people are interested in talking to you about your book and giving you
00:34:25.180
You got out miraculously out of the middle East and a one in a million chance stop whining
00:34:29.860
and quickly I'm able to come out of it because it's easy for us to whine about the, the immediate
00:34:39.200
But when you take a broader view, you do exactly what you did, which is I've got no reason to
00:34:45.120
I really succeeded in light of what I went through.
00:34:49.240
I mean, if you were to teleport back to your young self, um, you know, enduring all of
00:34:54.240
those difficulties and tell that young version, you know, what your life is like now and, and
00:35:00.820
also the complaints that you have, you know, how would that young person respond?
00:35:10.520
So in that sense, I think there, there is a kind of a silver lining.
00:35:14.760
What, what, if you don't want me asking, what was, uh, the reason I'm going to ask this
00:35:19.400
question is because I'm wondering if you did your PhD dissertation on a topic that relates
00:35:23.400
to your childhood stressors, what was your PhD dissertation on?
00:35:27.800
Um, it was, uh, let me, it was on moral psychology.
00:35:31.320
So my, um, you know, a lot of it was building on the work of Jonathan Haidt and others on
00:35:35.940
I did some studies on COVID-19 as it relates to the moral foundations.
00:35:39.560
Um, and, you know, I mean, unsurprisingly found that, um, people who were, you know,
00:35:45.160
highly concerned and this, you know, these studies were ran in the, um, the middle of
00:35:50.000
So the summer of 2020, when we were all locked down and, you know, all we could do were online
00:35:54.540
studies, um, with prolific and MTurk and so on.
00:35:57.540
And so, you know, just finding that people who were highly concerned with COVID-19, uh,
00:36:02.580
also, um, rated various moral transgressions more harshly, not just in, um, terms of purity
00:36:08.100
transgressions, but also authority and fairness and those things.
00:36:10.860
And it was, um, you know, largely, um, mediated by viscous sensitivity and those kinds of things.
00:36:16.440
So completely unrelated, unrelated to my, um, you know, to my book or to luxury beliefs.
00:36:22.720
Although I did, I did one study, uh, which I found a very strong correlation between, uh,
00:36:29.400
So people who scored very highly on social anxiety, um, also were, uh, uh, their moral
00:36:36.400
judgments were particularly sharp with regard to very basic conventional transgressions,
00:36:42.240
um, around authority and fairness and purity and these kinds of things.
00:36:46.540
And I found that to be kind of an interesting, I never did anything more with it, but I did find
00:36:50.700
it interesting that, uh, people who are very morally judgmental tend to be more socially
00:36:54.300
anxious and it was a pretty high correlation coefficient.
00:36:56.480
As far as psychology goes, it was like 0.43, uh, correlation coefficient.
00:37:01.180
Um, but you know, otherwise, yeah, it was, um, I just became very interested in psychology.
00:37:07.500
Uh, I read the righteous mind when I was an undergrad and, um, then in grad school, once the university
00:37:14.620
shut down for a time, research slowed, uh, I started to write online more.
00:37:19.420
Um, I wrote some popular articles about luxury beliefs, started writing the book and I saw,
00:37:26.080
I saw the direction of academia and, you know, you're very familiar with, um, a lot of the,
00:37:31.700
you know, shortcomings of higher ed and the direction things are going.
00:37:36.580
And so I reconsidered my decision to go the academic path.
00:37:42.400
I saw what happened with Erica Christakis at Yale.
00:37:45.280
That was my very first semester on campus at Yale was the Halloween costume controversy.
00:37:50.140
And then one reason why I decided to do my PhD at Cambridge was because I thought that the UK
00:37:59.600
would be less politically, um, and ideologically captured than the U S universities.
00:38:06.440
And I had this image in my mind of like these very stern, like Oxbridge dons who just had no time for
00:38:12.940
this kind of politically correct nonsense. Uh, but it turns out they do have time for it.
00:38:18.220
And, uh, there have been many cases of cancellations and disinvitations. Jordan Peterson was supposed
00:38:24.220
to be a guest research fellow at Cambridge. That's right.
00:38:26.380
My first year here in 2019, I was very excited for this. Um, and then he was disinvited and, you know,
00:38:34.760
there were kind of lower level, less, um, uh, sort of, uh, events that weren't as, as well covered in the
00:38:41.360
media that also occurred while I was a student. And so, yeah, I sort of transitioned away from that and
00:38:47.620
into more sort of public writing and, and sub stacking and those kinds of things. But yeah,
00:38:52.740
it's just been a strange, um, experience where, you know, I get, I get to Yale for undergrad suddenly,
00:38:58.680
you know, I see that happen with the Christoguses. Then I get to Cambridge and Jordan Peterson,
00:39:04.300
that happens. And so I'm like, you know, maybe, maybe this isn't the right, right path for me.
00:39:10.060
Right. Uh, by the way, I remember, uh, the first time that you reached out to me, uh, and,
00:39:19.300
and I think one of the reasons I remember it is probably because you mentioned that you were
00:39:25.860
an air force veteran. And one of the things that, uh, I take great pride in is when I receive,
00:39:34.580
you know, uh, loving, supportive emails from fans and so on where it is the corrections officer,
00:39:43.080
where it is the truck driver, where it is the military guy, because it's, it, it shouldn't be
00:39:49.060
surprising. Although most academics are invertebrate castrati, but assuming that there are a few who are
00:39:54.860
rational and reasonable. Well, it, it, it, it's not much of a feather off my cap that, that some guy
00:40:01.120
from Stanford says, Hey, I love your stuff. I'm a fan. That's okay. Fine. But if the guy who is doing
00:40:07.020
the six hour truck route in Kansas writes to me and I sit and says, you know, I, you don't know
00:40:13.820
how much your stuff is meant to me. I take great pride in that because I, I don't want to only be
00:40:18.360
speaking to the guys in the ivory tower. I think that's why I think my voice has resonated, you know,
00:40:23.640
within the larger crowd. And so I re I think I remember vividly, but although I think I had coded
00:40:29.120
it that you were doing your PhD at Yale and not your undergrad. And the only reason I, I corrected
00:40:37.480
that, that false memory in my brain is when I was preparing for this chat and I was looking at your
00:40:43.860
bio, I said, Oh, okay. He got his PhD at Cambridge. I thought he got his PhD at Yale. So I think it must
00:40:48.840
have been that when you first contacted me, you were still doing your undergrad. Does that make sense?
00:40:54.700
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I think so. I, I had heard you on Joe Rogan, you know, I was, you know,
00:40:59.420
when I was still in the air force, I would, my, my commutes, I would listen to Joe Rogan's podcast.
00:41:03.920
Right. And I think the first time I heard you must've been then, and then, yeah, you, you, you know,
00:41:08.420
you've been on his show multiple times and I must've heard you again, right around the time of all of
00:41:13.920
the campus controversies throughout 2015 to 16 to seven. I mean, they're endless, but you know, at one point I
00:41:20.980
heard you, um, you know, very intellectually courageous and talking about your concerns
00:41:26.440
with the universities. And yeah, I wrote you and said, you know, it's just, I don't remember exactly
00:41:31.480
what I said, but it was just so nice to hear a professor in the Academy who was, you know,
00:41:38.020
unafraid to say, uh, what was really happening. Uh, and so many professors were, were afraid. I mean,
00:41:45.980
I had, I remember I spoke with one professor at Yale maybe a year after the Christakis controversy
00:41:51.840
had blown over and he was telling me how he tweeted something in support of them and how hurt he was
00:41:59.860
to receive these emails and messages from undergrads who, you know, how, how could you support a racist
00:42:06.720
like Nicholas Christakis or Erica Christakis and so on and so forth. And he told me how hurt he was by
00:42:11.600
this. And I don't know, in my mind, and maybe it is because of my upbringing and kind of what I
00:42:19.280
consider to be hurtful or dangerous or unsafe versus what this professor thought. And maybe
00:42:24.520
that's why, you know, I, I would be curious if you think that's maybe why you're more courageous than
00:42:28.340
a lot of your peers in the Academy. So as he's telling me this, I thought like, you know, you're a
00:42:32.340
fully tenured professor at Yale and you care what a bunch of 19 year old kids think about you.
00:42:37.620
Um, how could this possibly be hurtful to you? I mean, you run a world-class lab, you're doing all
00:42:42.840
these great things. You're, you know, you, it just didn't, it didn't click for me that this would be
00:42:47.160
something to be upset about. But what, what do you think? Do you think that your courage comes a bit
00:42:52.560
from your experiences? I mean, yeah. I mean, to, to your earlier point where you said, you know,
00:42:57.040
there's kind of an inextricable mix of nature and nurture for most phenomena that we might talk about.
00:43:01.840
So certainly my, uh, you know, unique life trajectory might have contributed to that,
00:43:08.660
but I truly think that for this, for this exact issue that you're asking, it really is the,
00:43:15.560
the unique spots of the leopards that define my personhood, right? It's, you know, as far back as
00:43:21.900
I can remember before I ever experienced the Lebanese civil war, I'm someone who doesn't back down and
00:43:30.000
not, not because I'm a frivolously combative or I'm contrarian by design. I'm just, I think I put
00:43:37.240
it, as I explained in the first chapter of the perfect mind, I'm very, very much driven by,
00:43:41.140
by a pathological sense of purity, right? And my mother famously told me once, uh, when I was probably
00:43:48.260
in my early twenties, you know, God, you better learn quickly that the world doesn't abide to your
00:43:53.440
purity bubble. And that's something that's always come back to me because I've got this kind of, uh,
00:43:58.900
stylized view of how the world ought to be. It should be pure. You should not tell lies. You
00:44:03.800
should be dignified. You should have honor. And when I see all these castrated people not acting
00:44:09.640
this way, it is really an attack on my sense of wellbeing. Like, how could this person be such
00:44:15.680
a coward? And I remember when I was five, six years old, when we would go to the, uh, synagogue in,
00:44:21.240
in Beirut, uh, you know, with my father and I would ask my dad, okay, well, why are we now standing
00:44:26.740
up during this prayer? Why are we sitting down? Why are we doing left? Why are we doing the,
00:44:30.480
doing the Macarena to the right? And then he, and then his answer was like, you know, shut up,
00:44:34.820
just do. And that had struck. And maybe that was my original, at least as far as I can remember,
00:44:41.040
my original sort of disdain towards sort of organized rituals of religion. What do you mean?
00:44:47.360
Just do tell me why I'm doing it. Right. And so, so to answer your question in a long-winded way,
00:44:52.480
I think that, yes, maybe my, my background has a bit to contribute to that, but I just think it's
00:44:58.240
just part of my unique personhood. The unique random combination of genes makes me that I can't
00:45:03.820
not be who I am. Whereas to your point, it amazes me that tenured professors who by definition are
00:45:12.300
getting the institutional protection to give them liquid courage, right? You drink a beer so that you
00:45:19.380
can get the courage to go up to the beautiful girl in the bar. Well, tenure is this big, big jug of
00:45:25.680
beer that protects you. Nobody can touch you. And yet you're still whimpering in a fetal position.
00:45:31.020
I'll give you a quick story, which you may have seen me comment on, uh, on social media or not.
00:45:36.100
I had a guy, his, his people, whatever his publicist, his agent, whatever reached out to me.
00:45:42.760
He's a senior, of course, tenured Harvard professor of computer science. He is a winner
00:45:49.680
of the Turing award, which is, you know, equivalent to having won the Nobel prize. It's named after
00:45:56.520
Alan Turing, the famous British mathematician. And his agent says, oh, professor so-and-so would like
00:46:04.000
to come on your show to discuss his upcoming book. I said, oh, that's fantastic. Great. You know,
00:46:09.600
I'm always open to having all kinds of conversations also cause all sorts of people.
00:46:13.520
And so we go back and forth many, many times to finally set a schedule. And then the agent writes
00:46:18.980
back to me and says, I am so sorry to tell you this. I'm so sorry to, I apologize for wasting
00:46:23.720
your time, but professor so-and-so has decided that, you know, you're too political and he doesn't
00:46:29.160
want to get into. Now I had already explained to, to the agent because the guy, the professor,
00:46:35.180
the author had said, he doesn't want to talk anything political on the show. And I said,
00:46:40.200
absolutely fine. We will only discuss, I have a computer science background and a math background,
00:46:45.400
so we will completely geek it out. It will be a nerd talk. It'll be computer science stuff,
00:46:50.660
analysis of algorithms, Turing machines. So I gave him that guarantee, but yet he felt too scared.
00:46:57.880
I'm assuming here, I'm speculating, but that's exactly what it was, that what if his cool friends
00:47:02.960
at Harvard find out that they spoke to the real ogre Nazi got sad, no more invitations to the
00:47:12.040
cool kids party. And to me, that is so undignified. It's so cowardly. So it speaks to exactly your
00:47:18.240
point. Yeah. I just, you know, it's, I remember I had this, this conversation with the professor
00:47:23.500
asking, why is it that, why is it that professors with tenure won't speak their minds? And they gave
00:47:31.400
me that exact answer that basically because they want to have friends. And you can't have friends
00:47:37.900
as a tenured professor, if you speak your mind and go against the orthodoxy, but they just won't be
00:47:43.240
the friends at the, you know, the fancy parties that, that you want to go to. You want to be accepted
00:47:49.980
by a certain social group. And, you know, you don't want to be whatever, receive mean posts and emails
00:47:57.680
on Twitter and so on. And it's just so cowardly. I mean, what's the point of, of having tenure?
00:48:03.060
And, you know, I, I have friends who are going down that path. They are, um, doing PhDs and postdocs
00:48:11.540
and early career researchers, and they are, um, attempting to do the thing where you keep your
00:48:18.020
mouth shut and color within the lines. And then once you get tenure, speak out. But I do wonder if
00:48:22.220
over time, if you spend years upon years doing that, if, you know, at some level that becomes
00:48:29.440
who you are. And then when you do get tenure, um, you know, you've, you've become accustomed
00:48:34.100
to keeping your mouth shut. Well, and there's always the next expectation, you know, so now I
00:48:38.840
am a tenured associate professor, but I don't want to risk my full professorship. Well, now I got my
00:48:45.100
full professorship. There's a chaired professorship. So there is always some can down the road that I
00:48:52.140
need to modulate my true authenticity in order to, you know, navigate through my careerist machinations.
00:48:59.520
What an inauthentic cowardly way to live now, but to the point of, are you going to be appreciated
00:49:05.040
and admired by the right people? Even if I were to use that calculus, I would argue that full
00:49:12.240
authenticity is the best way to achieve that. And let me, let me use my personal experience.
00:49:18.440
Had I modulated my speech in such a way that I'm only accepted by the people who drink their coffee
00:49:26.120
this way and have a progressive lisp in academia, then probably Elon Musk would not have become a
00:49:33.740
friend, right? Elon Musk loves exactly the things that Gadsad is, right? So if I originally,
00:49:40.680
if I had come into a priori with the goal of impressing the right people, who better person
00:49:46.420
to impress than Elon Musk? But I didn't come into it with this approach, right? I said, I'm going to
00:49:52.020
present myself to the world as Gadsad. The people who like it, great. The people who don't can go F
00:49:59.740
themselves. And then guess what? The right people show up. I'll give you another example. I received an
00:50:05.600
email. So you may or may not know that my biggest hero, whom I'm willing to leave my wife for is
00:50:12.260
Lionel Messi, right? So, you know, I used to be a serious soccer player. I love Lionel Messi, not only
00:50:19.900
for his intergalactic talent, but also the way he carries himself. What a man of humility, a family
00:50:26.660
guy, never a scandal, just a perfect role model. Well, one day I'm opening my messages and I have
00:50:33.980
an email from, so dear Professor Saad, my name is so-and-so. I am the majority owner of Inter Miami
00:50:42.080
FC. I know of your love of Lionel Messi. Anytime that you'd like to come to a game and meet him and
00:50:49.000
hang out, you're my guest. Well, from my perspective, to my earlier point about being able to reach the
00:50:55.720
corrections officer, the military guy and the truck driver, being able to have a corpus of material
00:51:04.940
that allows me to have Elon Musk appreciate me and the owner of Inter Miami is a lot better than
00:51:13.500
having some smarmy idiot with a progressive lisp saying, oh, we love that you love Biden more than,
00:51:20.760
you know? So even on that metric, I think I've won what they're trying to win.
00:51:27.680
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I think there's, that's the key. If you want to become friends with
00:51:32.280
those who you would actually get along with and who you don't have to edit yourself around,
00:51:37.060
uh, then be yourself. I remember my first year I arrived at Cambridge.
00:51:43.340
I, you know, being a PhD student is already somewhat isolating. Um, it's not like, um,
00:51:50.100
undergrad where you're, you know, with classes and social events and so on. It's, it's, it's a little
00:51:53.680
bit different, especially in the UK. It's very self-driven. And, um, so it was difficult to find
00:52:00.940
social groups and everything. And, and also because of the, you know, the prevailing dogma at a
00:52:07.480
university, but shortly after, uh, Jordan was disinvited from campus, I wrote an op-ed, uh,
00:52:16.380
challenging the university's decision to do this. And, you know, somehow, uh, the New York times
00:52:22.360
actually ran it. Uh, this was 2019 before 2020, when they became fully what they are now, the New
00:52:29.280
York times pre 2020 was still, you know, they, they, yeah, they would run different kinds of op-eds.
00:52:33.280
And so they ran this. And, um, and then within 24 hours, I started to receive emails from other
00:52:39.640
students, from faculty, from people all around the university who agreed with me and who, you know,
00:52:46.580
wanted to meet. And, you know, and, and as a result of that, I, I made a lot of friends and became
00:52:51.480
plugged in to a lot of different social networks on campus, kind of underground dissenters and people
00:52:56.540
who, you know, and without that, you know, who knows, my experience would have been a lot different,
00:53:02.440
um, in terms of the connections I made, the friendships that I formed, the people that I
00:53:06.400
met. Um, and so I, yeah, I, I think there's a, a lot of value to, to be gained from just being
00:53:13.380
yourself and, and seeing what happens. Um, even if a lot of people don't like you for a year old,
00:53:18.600
I think a lot of people, you know, you'd be surprised at the number of people who quietly agree
00:53:21.780
with you and who, um, you know, uh, will, will reach out as a result. Yeah.
00:53:27.660
Right. So what, what's your, so you, you, you've, you mentioned earlier that you're,
00:53:31.700
you know, you've made the, the willful decision that, you know, academia is not for me. Okay.
00:53:36.600
Fair enough. Which of course is, is so regrettable in that I know of a million such cases where people
00:53:42.620
write to me, right. They say, Oh, I just completed two postdocs. Here's my CV professor, but I'm out of
00:53:48.400
this dump. And, and, and, you know, my heart aches because you're losing that brain capital,
00:53:53.240
right. That person in the right environment, in the right ecosystem could have done great thing.
00:53:57.940
And they said, and I understand them. They said, I'm out this, this sucks. Uh, so, okay. Academia
00:54:02.760
is out. So where do you see your, you know, professional trajectory heading? Do you have a
00:54:08.780
sense or is it very much serendipitous ad hoc? Let's see what the next possible move might be.
00:54:14.580
Um, it's, it's more so, um, ad hoc. Um, I'm doing things that I enjoy and, you know,
00:54:22.460
so Substack has been, um, just a terrific platform for me. Um, I started writing a newsletter when I
00:54:29.160
was still in grad school and then Substack approached me to move to their platform.
00:54:33.360
And, you know, that was back when they were still doing Substack pro deals. Um, so they
00:54:37.500
gave me a very generous advance. And so I've remained on their platform. I write, um, you know,
00:54:42.840
two or three posts a week and that's been paying the bills. And I did a lecture series for Peterson
00:54:48.840
Academy. Um, and you know, I, I wish great things for, you know, all kinds of experiments
00:54:56.180
right now in higher education. Uh, you know, I think there can be reform from within. Um,
00:55:01.280
I, but I think that will be a kind of decades long or potentially generations long battle,
00:55:05.920
uh, to recapture the legacy institutions. So, you know, in the meantime, I think, yeah,
00:55:11.360
if people want to launch new, um, educational ventures, you know, I'm all for it.
00:55:15.240
Um, and yeah, I mean, you know, with the book, um, it's doing well. Um, I have been,
00:55:20.780
uh, you know, I've, I've had informal conversations with Hollywood producers, uh, about the possibility
00:55:27.560
of option. Yeah. But these have just been informal kind of conversations. Um, so there is some interest
00:55:33.660
there. I haven't signed anything yet, so we'll see how that goes. Um, but I, yeah, I think a lot
00:55:38.940
of people are connecting with the story. One thing that I didn't expect actually with this book,
00:55:43.180
I had this concern when I was writing it that people wouldn't actually, um, um, follow it or
00:55:49.300
connect with it because it's such a unusual experience. Most people don't know anyone in
00:55:53.180
foster care. They have no contact with it. And I wondered if people would just find this so
00:55:57.240
foreign to their own experience, but I've been surprised at the number of readers who've contacted
00:56:01.840
me and said that, you know, despite the, you know, they, they've had maybe more sort of conventional
00:56:07.820
upbringings, but there may have been issues with addiction in their family or divorce or abuse or
00:56:14.040
neglect or all of those kinds of things that a lot of people in their families have, you know,
00:56:17.420
suffered and, and endured and people are connected. Upward mobility is another big theme of the book
00:56:23.300
as well of coming from this kind of working class background into higher ed and kind of the
00:56:28.560
observations and lessons I learned along the way people connect with that. And so it seems like,
00:56:33.720
um, the book has a more, as a wider, more universal readership than I anticipated. And so, you know,
00:56:41.480
that's, that's been, um, uh, gratifying to see. So, but otherwise, you know, I'm, I'm, uh, keeping,
00:56:47.000
keeping options open and seeing what, what comes at me. And, you know, it's been, it's been, you know,
00:56:50.860
rewarding so far. Who would be the dream, uh, actor to play Rob Henderson? Someone, someone more
00:56:57.500
handsome than me. I always tell people that it would be very difficult to turn my, uh, story into
00:57:05.000
a film because who could you have that could be as handsome as the original God's art. So that's
00:57:10.940
the obstacle I face. Uh, but see, by the way, this kind of humor, when I make it, I will get a thought
00:57:18.220
of it. Many people will laugh and get the joke. Other people will say, you're so arrogant and
00:57:23.180
narcissistic. One of the things that shocks me the most about, uh, uh, you know, my interactions on
00:57:29.660
social media is the extent to which there is an epidemic of humorless people. It's just mind-blowing,
00:57:38.040
right? Because as someone who, who is, you know, very jocular and I can be very self-deprecating,
00:57:43.540
I can joke about other people, I can make fun of anything I could, you know, just, just having fun
00:57:48.760
life as a playground. I'm amazed at the amount of time, for example, that people miss
00:57:53.180
my sarcasm. So I had one guy recently, a Jewish guy, I won't mention his name, but it's a very,
00:57:58.380
very Jewish name, write me this scathing email because I, I, you know, I, I often use sarcasm
00:58:04.940
and satire when I'm making a position. And so I, I wrote a tweet where it would clearly seem that I'm,
00:58:10.380
you know, anti, anti-Jewish, Hamas, you know, I'm pro-Hamas and it's the Jews that did and so on.
00:58:16.580
I'm Jewish, right? I'm very anti-Hamas. So he writes me this scathing thing where, I mean,
00:58:22.200
really, really brutally nasty. And so I just kind of write back, uh, you are a genuinely
00:58:29.340
abject schmuck. Do a bit more research and maybe you could find that, you know, blah, blah, blah.
00:58:36.840
So then he writes me to his credit, a very, very sort of civil apology. I say, it's all forgotten.
00:58:42.040
It's all good. But it gives you a sense of the amount of bile and anger and humorless that happens.
00:58:47.800
Is this something that, I mean, I know you, you don't use humor as often as I do, but is this
00:58:51.980
something that you've also picked up in your social media engagement? Uh, yeah. I mean, I think that,
00:58:58.720
um, you know, inevitably as your following grows, you're going to attract, you know, people who are
00:59:04.280
a bit unhinged. You know, there was a great post, uh, I think it was from Tim Ferriss a few years ago
00:59:09.940
about something like, you know, what happens when you become famous and, you know, I'm not, you know,
00:59:14.620
I'm not as famous as Tim Ferriss, but he had this line in there about something like, you know,
00:59:18.520
if you assume one in a thousand people is crazy, uh, and you have a hundred thousand followers,
00:59:24.440
then that means a hundred crazy people follow you. And I'm like, you know, that's like a, you know,
00:59:29.980
mathematically it helps to, to, to, uh, contextualize. And so I do get unhinged emails on occasion or
00:59:36.420
people who say, you know, that I'm, you know, that I'm, I'm classist, uh, somehow, or that I'm
00:59:42.740
downplaying the importance, uh, or the role of that poverty plays in people's life and all these
00:59:48.400
other things. And I, and of course I don't do these things. I don't know if I'm classist, but I,
00:59:52.740
you know, I'm, I'm willing to make, uh, value judgments that, um, you know, uh, not committing
00:59:57.900
crimes is better than committing crimes. And people will call me classist for something like that.
01:00:01.560
Um, so of course, yeah, Zuby, he, he writes about how, you know, once, once you reach a certain
01:00:09.620
number of followers, you just have to become more active in terms of muting and blocking and just,
01:00:17.760
you know, and, uh, I wasn't expecting that, you know, I think probably right around the time I
01:00:23.040
crossed maybe 20 or 30,000 followers, it was just this dramatic increase in trolls and people who would
01:00:28.980
willing, willingly and willfully sort of uncharitably interpreting everything you post.
01:00:35.860
And that can be very obnoxious, but yeah, I, I, I, yeah, I admire your, your, your humorous tweets.
01:00:41.960
I think we need more of it. And, uh, you know, it's nice to, you know, you get all these people
01:00:46.200
posting negative stuff and posting their hot takes. And then I see one of your tweets that I'm
01:00:49.740
like, ah, you know, it's nice to, nice to laugh. Well, you know, it's funny because I joke with my
01:00:54.980
wife, I say, you know, I'm going to start getting offended because whenever I would say 70% of the
01:01:01.800
time, Rob, when a fan comes up to me on the street, it won't be about something professorial
01:01:08.220
that I've done. Oh, I loved your, you know, stuff on evolutionary psychology or, or this,
01:01:13.700
it'll always be about how much some humorous schtick I'm doing resonates with them, right?
01:01:20.220
That, you know, they, they love this, they're cracking up laughing, but in, in a sense, it
01:01:25.520
points to the fact of how humor is so disarming, you know, right? One of the things that, you know,
01:01:32.000
I've often been asked is, you know, why, why don't you get even more hate than you get? Because
01:01:36.680
you know, I really do. I, I never hold back anything. I, I don't modulate a millimeter of
01:01:42.860
speech. And yet you would think that I should get a hell of a lot more hate. And I think part of that
01:01:47.600
is the personal style with which you deliver your message, which is even your detractors,
01:01:54.500
once they get to know you and see, you know, a warmth, a playfulness that it, it makes it a bit
01:02:00.980
harder for people to hate you if you have a warm, uh, style in your communication. Well, what do you
01:02:07.200
think? I think that's, that's right. Um, and yeah, having a warm style and also not having, uh, an
01:02:14.580
overtly cantankerous disposition too, I think that also helps. Um, you know, I, I know others
01:02:23.400
who have large followings who seem to attract a, a disproportionate share of haters and trolls and
01:02:29.440
detractors. And, you know, I think many of them bring it on themselves because they will frame their
01:02:34.620
thoughts in the most, um, barbed and vicious and aggressive way possible. Um, versus if you take the
01:02:42.100
same observation and package it in the form of, of like you might as a joke or as, uh, you know,
01:02:47.200
trying to see the humor in a real life, uh, phenomenon or, you know, referencing a study or
01:02:52.580
just being sort of more neutral or impartial about your observation. Um, you know, there are different
01:02:58.520
ways to frame the same post and you'll get very different, uh, kinds of people who, who follow you
01:03:05.360
and who, uh, will, um, ridicule you for it. Well, uh, last question. Are there any projects that you're
01:03:14.480
currently working on that are not yet out the next book, a next project, the new media, whatever it is
01:03:20.880
that you'd like to use this opportunity to promote, take it away. Uh, nothing, uh, nothing in the sort of
01:03:28.160
medium to long-term, but you know, short-term, um, I'm still promoting the book, of course, Troubled
01:03:33.900
and my sub stack, uh, robkhenderson.com, um, where I write, yeah, two to three posts a week.
01:03:42.100
And, um, yeah, it seems to be, um, growing in, in popularity and interest, especially since the
01:03:47.220
book's been out. Wonderful. Well, listen, continue success with the book, Rob. I'm so glad that we
01:03:52.400
finally met both in person. I look forward to following, uh, your growing career. Come back
01:04:00.020
anytime you'd like, stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline. Thank you so much for coming on.