Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - Dr. Rob Henderson on How Luxury Beliefs Have Damaged American Society | The TRUTH Podcast #50

00:00:00.000 The postmodern woke worldview effectively says that our relationships with each other are governed by invisible power relationships based on race, gender, sexuality, and other genetically inherited characteristics.

00:00:23.000 This is a successor to a Marxist worldview, going back to Hegel and others that believe that that could be defined on the basis of wealth, but it comes down to nonetheless power relationships.

00:00:33.000 A philosopher named Foucault was one of the pioneers of this way of thinking that finds itself in the avatar of modern wokeism.

00:00:42.000 But the reality is that entire worldview is now being weaponized to actually create a new power structure with the people who are in charge.

00:00:50.000 It creates a new kind of belief system, what my guest on today's show calls luxury beliefs.

00:00:57.000 Beliefs that those who are actually culturally empowered are allowed to have to make themselves feel better.

00:01:04.000 That harm the very people they're supposedly helping.

00:01:08.000 Clear the jails.

00:01:09.000 Defund the police.

00:01:11.000 Open borders.

00:01:12.000 The kinds of things that actually create problems for the very people you're supposed to help in inner cities and other parts of this country, but which allow you to increase your sense of moral superiority.

00:01:23.000 That's a dangerous kind of belief because it at once makes you see yourself as superior to your fellow man because of your charitable instincts that you're able to wear on your sleeve, but with actual effects in the real world that leave other people worse off.

00:01:39.000 It's a form of psychological oppression, actually.

00:01:43.000 Take the example of what we teach young kids in the classroom.

00:01:46.000 Because of the woke worldview that teaches young kids that you are oppressed based on your sexual orientation or your race, we're teaching a generation of kids that you can't get ahead in this country because of your own genetic attributes.

00:02:00.000 I could think of nothing more damaging to tell a young person than to say that your genetics on day one limit what you can actually achieve.

00:02:07.000 And it turns out that's actually a self-fulfilling prophecy for many kids.

00:02:10.000 I'll give you another example.

00:02:12.000 Comes down to the issue of the family.

00:02:13.000 Professor Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia opens one of his classes with an interesting question.

00:02:19.000 He asks you to raise your hand in the classroom if you believe that having children outside of marriage is wrong.

00:02:26.000 Two thirds of the class says, no, it's not wrong.

00:02:29.000 You have no problem with that and that's fine.

00:02:31.000 But then he asks them, how many of you are planning to have children out of wedlock or are you gonna wait until you actually get married before having kids?

00:02:38.000 97% of the kids say they would wait until getting married before having kids.

00:02:42.000 And then he says, put your hand up if your parents would freak out if you actually had a kid before you got married.

00:02:49.000 99% of the hands in the class go up.

00:02:51.000 What do we know?

00:02:52.000 Kids who are born into a stable two-parent household tend to have better outcomes, educationally, economically, in terms of health and happiness, than kids who aren't.

00:03:00.000 It's a fashionable thing to say.

00:03:02.000 It is a luxury belief to say that the nuclear family is antiquated, as the Black Lives Matter movement posted on their website several years ago, calling for the dismantling of the nuclear family structure.

00:03:12.000 It's a fashionable thing to say in elite corridors.

00:03:14.000 But when it comes to the way you live your own life, People are actually choosing what's best for them, even though what they say creates a negative externality for the way that other people live their life because you influence the culture accordingly.

00:03:29.000 Well, my guest today has a first-hand experience that isn't just academic in nature.

00:03:34.000 He's actually the person who coined this term luxury belief.

00:03:37.000 He's been in elite places like Yale.

00:03:39.000 He has a PhD, has a lot of letters after his last name, educational pedigree, and a success background that kids from any background across this country would aspire to.

00:03:48.000 Wealthy or poor, you want your kid to grow up to be like my guest today.

00:03:53.000 But nonetheless, his story that got him there is a little bit more complicated.

00:03:57.000 He's been through the foster care system in America, a broken system.

00:04:01.000 One that I've only recently begun to understand how broken it really is.

00:04:06.000 And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

00:04:09.000 It's unjust.

00:04:10.000 It's a system that in the name of serving our kids is actually leaving the The kids who participated in that system worse off for it.

00:04:18.000 And it's part of what feeds into this broader culture of creating these belief systems, these luxury beliefs that allow the people who adopt them to have a higher sense of self-importance, but actually leave as a casualty the people who are left holding the bag are the very ones they purport to help.

00:04:36.000 So I'm looking forward to hearing his personal story today.

00:04:38.000 We're not just going to go into analytical arguments today.

00:04:40.000 We're going to go through the story of a young man whose story I've been drawn to.

00:04:45.000 I'm excited to learn more about his insights, but not just through his research, but through his life journey that led him there.

00:04:52.000 So with that, I'd like to welcome to the podcast today my guest, Rob Henderson.

00:04:57.000 Yeah, thank you, Vivek.

00:04:58.000 It's great to be here.

00:04:59.000 So tell me a little bit about your own definition of the term that I think you pioneered.

00:05:04.000 What is a luxury belief?

00:05:06.000 Right.

00:05:07.000 Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

00:05:17.000 And yeah, as you mentioned, a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her beliefs.

00:05:26.000 And you mentioned a couple of examples there.

00:05:28.000 We can get into some others.

00:05:29.000 But as you mentioned, it really did start with my arrival at Yale, having come from a very different background than a lot of the other students.

00:05:40.000 At Yale, there are more students from the top 1% of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60%.

00:05:46.000 I knew going in that Yale's a pretty well-known institution.

00:05:51.000 I figured there were going to be vast economic differences, economic class background differences between me and many other students.

00:05:57.000 I wasn't prepared for kind of the cultural class differences in terms of the opinions and the attitudes and beliefs and movements that a lot of these students and professors and administrators We're espousing and gradually through sort of reading up on psychology and sociology and interacting with people and reflecting on my own life and my experiences traveling along the class ladder, I finally arrived at this idea of luxury beliefs.

00:06:25.000 And, you know, it's backed up by sociological frameworks and empirical social psychology, which we can get into if you want.

00:06:31.000 But it really is for me and for many others, it's become a new way of understanding the American status system.

00:06:37.000 Hmm.

00:06:38.000 And you use words like status and class.

00:06:40.000 This interests me.

00:06:41.000 I also went to Harvard and then Yale.

00:06:44.000 I've been in the corridors.

00:06:45.000 And some of what I say is familiar, not in the same way that it is to you, but in a parallel way.

00:06:50.000 I grew up in an immigrant, first-generation household for whom much of that so-called elite Northeastern educational corridor was a foreign notion.

00:07:00.000 And there's a lot of adjustment for me as well.

00:07:02.000 But you pinpointed particularly on wealth, and that fascinates me.

00:07:09.000 How certain are you that class and wealth overlap here?

00:07:12.000 That's my question.

00:07:13.000 They overlap, but not entirely.

00:07:17.000 You know, in my book, I go into some of the nuances of what class is in America.

00:07:24.000 And there was a great social critic, Paul Fossil, he wrote this book called Class, A Guide Through the American Status System.

00:07:31.000 And essentially, he points out that there are three ingredients to social class in America.

00:07:36.000 So there's wealth.

00:07:37.000 That's one ingredient.

00:07:38.000 The second is education, specifically sort of elite education.

00:07:41.000 If you want to reach the sort of upper classes in America, you have to go through certain institutions.

00:07:46.000 And then finally, there's customs, habits, mannerisms, the way you carry yourself, and so on.

00:07:53.000 And so now, if you are, you know, the scion of an old money family, Even if you lose all of your wealth and even if you never went to a fancy university, the fact that you were born into that type of family and you were immersed in that kind of upper-class habitus and worldview, that makes you a member of that class and you would be accepted by members of that class even though you don't have the money and you don't have the educational credentials.

00:08:20.000 Basically, the higher you go, the less wealth matters and the more institution matters in terms of where you graduated from college.

00:08:27.000 And eventually, what comes to matter the most is your worldview, and I argue, to a large extent, your luxury beliefs.

00:08:35.000 These are the newest expression of cultural capital.

00:08:39.000 This is how you indicate your membership into a certain class in America.

00:08:44.000 But you're right, it's not entirely just about wealth.

00:08:47.000 If you win the lottery, you don't suddenly become catapulted into the elite.

00:08:51.000 There's much more besides wealth that is involved in class.

00:08:55.000 Yeah, and what are examples, you would say, of some of the most salient luxury beliefs that you think typify your understanding of it?

00:09:05.000 Well, I coined the term luxury beliefs in 2019, and I would have never guessed that within a matter of months, you would be reading in the pages of the New York Times that a headline that said, yes, we literally mean abolish the police.

00:09:20.000 That was a real headline in one of their opinion pages.

00:09:24.000 And so that typifies another luxury belief, open borders, promoting Polyamory, downplaying the importance of family.

00:09:38.000 Another would be promoting the sale of addictive technology to the masses while exercising very careful screen use at home.

00:09:48.000 A lot of tech entrepreneurs will get rich selling a technology but then send their kids to schools where no screens are allowed.

00:09:58.000 Drug legalization.

00:10:00.000 Recently, I'm sure you're familiar with the fact that Oregon in 2020 decriminalized drugs.

00:10:07.000 And then just a couple of months ago, they reintroduced legislation to recriminalize drugs because people were literally dying in the streets of drug overdoses.

00:10:14.000 And it makes you sound sympathetic.

00:10:17.000 It makes you sound compassionate.

00:10:18.000 It makes you sound sophisticated to say, actually, the best way to combat drug use is to just legalize all drugs.

00:10:25.000 And, you know, of course, in your gated community, you're not seeing firsthand the consequences of what happens when people, you know, freely use street drugs in sort of open air communities.

00:10:37.000 And you see people overdosing and dying on the streets and children are seeing that.

00:10:42.000 Poor and working class children are sort of stepping over these people. 0.96

00:10:46.000 So, you know, there are a variety of these ideas that are rooted in...

00:10:50.000 A lot of it is rooted in compassion.

00:10:52.000 A lot of it is rooted in naivete.

00:10:54.000 I think a lot of it is also driven by malice and the sort of desire for status and for power.

00:11:04.000 And a third...

00:11:06.000 A third reason for this is cowardice.

00:11:08.000 These are sort of the three driving factors behind luxury beliefs.

00:11:13.000 I think the large majority of people are just naive and don't understand what they're supporting.

00:11:16.000 They just want to look good.

00:11:18.000 They want to sound compassionate.

00:11:19.000 They want to be accepted by their peers.

00:11:20.000 I think a small percentage, maybe 10 or 20%, are actually actively malicious and promote these views in order to attain more power.

00:11:27.000 And then another group, a relatively small group, I think they understand that these views are ultimately harmful, but they're just cowardly and go along with it.

00:11:38.000 You know, you use the word luxury, it implies that you're focused a lot on the harm that it has on others, and that is immediately apparent.

00:11:47.000 What's less apparent is why this is a luxury, right?

00:11:51.000 If you wear a diamond earring, I suppose it doesn't give you the same sensation as eating a tasty bite of pizza or something like that when you're hungry.

00:11:59.000 That gives you satisfaction, but that's not quite a luxury.

00:12:02.000 Whereas most things that we think of as a luxury, certain types of luxury, like a jewelry is what you signify to others.

00:12:07.000 Other types of luxuries could be going on a particularly Particularly comfortable vacation, right?

00:12:15.000 That's a luxury.

00:12:16.000 It's not something that you require, but it's something that you're able to do to provide an excess level of satisfaction to yourself.

00:12:23.000 What is it about this set of beliefs?

00:12:25.000 I see the negative effects on others, which is obvious.

00:12:28.000 What is it about what it gives back to you that makes that a luxury good?

00:12:33.000 Yeah, well, so luxury goods aren't just about you, right?

00:12:36.000 Yes, it's in part about you.

00:12:38.000 So you drive a fancy sports car or carry a designer handbag, and it makes you feel good.

00:12:44.000 But there's also the element of part of the reason why it makes you feel good is because other people get to see you carrying that handbag or driving that fancy car.

00:12:52.000 You know, if you were on a desert island, how much pleasure would you get carrying that handbag around?

00:12:59.000 So I date the idea of luxury beliefs really back to the turn of the 20th century.

00:13:05.000 Thorsten Veblen wrote this book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, in 1899. He was a sociologist and economist.

00:13:12.000 And one thing that Veblen points out in his book is that the elites of his day would signify their membership into this upper strat of society through luxury goods, through Delicate and expensive clothes, top hats and tuxedos and evening gowns, pocket watches, monocles, attending expensive events.

00:13:37.000 Basically, this was a way to signal one's fortunate economic material circumstances.

00:13:42.000 You can't just necessarily look at someone and understand how much money they have, but when they're wearing certain kinds of clothes, it does inform you about their status in society.

00:13:56.000 If you fast forward to the mid-20th century, there was a sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu, and he pointed out that a lot of elites, members of the upper class, would convert their economic capital into what he called cultural capital.

00:14:08.000 So, you know, at this point in the mid-20th century, wealthy people would send their kids to private schools, they would learn intricate and arcane knowledge about wine and art and exotic locations, and they would have this sort of refined and sophisticated knowledge.

00:14:24.000 And yeah, of course, it would make them feel good about themselves to know all these facts.

00:14:28.000 And part of it is because when you're at a cocktail party or something, or you're just sort of out in society and expressing these views, you're signifying something about yourself that you're a member of this segment of society.

00:14:41.000 So fast forwarding a little bit more, a couple of years ago, there was a great book by Michael Knox Barron called Wasps, The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.

00:14:50.000 Wasp here meaning white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

00:14:53.000 And this was the American ruling class from roughly the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.

00:14:57.000 And I mean, the book is, I mean, it's a very thick book.

00:15:00.000 It's filled with interesting insights, but one core insight of the book that Baron points out is that what he termed the high wasps, sort of the tippy top of this strata, the high wasps would often support fashionable causes because this would irritate the Bulgarians.

00:15:17.000 In other words, a lot of wasps would support movements and ideas simply because they were counter-cultural, because they were unconventional, because they would upset other people.

00:15:27.000 So if conventional opinion is X, a good way to show that you're a member of high society is to believe Y. And oh, these unwashed masses who are believing X, how silly. 0.92

00:15:36.000 And so my point is that today, Those are luxury beliefs. 0.95

00:15:41.000 If the vast majority of people think, actually, getting married before you have kids is a pretty good idea, a way for you to signal that you're not a conventionally minded simpleton is to take the opposite view.

00:15:53.000 Actually, all family structures can work out in a different way, and ultimately, You can find ways to make these things work.

00:16:00.000 We don't need more police.

00:16:02.000 We actually need to defund the police and instead fund violence interrupters.

00:16:05.000 We need to give back the money to the community and legalize drugs and stop penalizing crime, and somehow this will magically lead to a better society.

00:16:14.000 So anything and so in my book, I I indicate the statistics of the vast majority of Americans believe police are good.

00:16:22.000 The vast majority of Americans believe that marriage before kids is a wise idea.

00:16:27.000 The vast majority of Americans don't want to decriminalize drugs.

00:16:31.000 And yet when you look at Americans with college degrees, Americans with six figure incomes and so on and so forth, basically people who are very fortunate, they are disproportionately likely to believe in the opposite.

00:16:44.000 And they make them look good.

00:16:46.000 They make them look sophisticated.

00:16:47.000 And in the aggregate, when these ideas are implemented into the culture, if they get implemented into policy as the defund the police idea did in many cities across the country, ultimately, the people who suffer the most are people ultimately, the people who suffer the most are people at the bottom.

00:17:07.000 Well, I think part of what makes your story so interesting is that you're not just coming at this as some type of academic.

00:17:13.000 You have...

00:17:15.000 This entire exercise is not a luxury belief or exercise of your own, if you will.

00:17:20.000 It's something that comes out of your own life story.

00:17:24.000 I think it'd be interesting for a lot of people to hear, it'd be interesting for me to hear, about your experience in the foster care system.

00:17:32.000 And people use this word a lot, but I thought it might be worth actually just defining what the foster care system actually is.

00:17:41.000 And what your own experience in going through it was actually like, because that colors, I think, a lot of the beliefs that you later arrive at.

00:17:49.000 Yes, it did.

00:17:52.000 I, you know, as you mentioned, I have these degrees from these institutions, but, you know, back in Way Up, my life was a lot different.

00:18:01.000 I was born into poverty in Los Angeles and never knew my father.

00:18:10.000 My mother came to the US from Seoul, from South Korea as a young woman.

00:18:15.000 She was supposed to study in LA and then she started partying and doing a lot of drugs and Got pregnant with me, and her life unraveled. 0.79

00:18:26.000 We lived in a car for a time.

00:18:28.000 We were homeless.

00:18:29.000 Eventually, we settled in this slum apartment in LA. And when I was three years old, some police arrived, and they saw that my mother was not in a position to care for me.

00:18:41.000 They asked her, where's this boy's father?

00:18:43.000 She said she didn't know where or who my dad was.

00:18:47.000 And in fact, only recently, I took a 23andMe genetic ancestry test a couple of years ago and discovered that I'm half Hispanic.

00:18:54.000 My father was Mexican and my mom was Korean.

00:18:56.000 So now what I tell people is, you know, before I took the test that night, I went to bed as a white adjacent Asian American and then I woke up as an underrepresented minority, you know, as a Hispanic.

00:19:09.000 And I wish I had known that before I applied to colleges.

00:19:12.000 That would have been helpful information.

00:19:15.000 So I'm three years old.

00:19:18.000 My mom, she's strung out. 0.99

00:19:21.000 The cops take me and put me into the LA County foster care system.

00:19:26.000 I lived in seven different foster homes over the next five years, bouncing around.

00:19:32.000 Some of these homes had upwards of eight or ten children living in them.

00:19:36.000 I recently read that LA has the worst, most overburdened foster care system in the country.

00:19:42.000 I don't know if that was true when I was growing through it in the 90s.

00:19:44.000 It wouldn't have surprised me if it was.

00:19:48.000 And some people ask me, why is it that kids get relocated so many times?

00:19:53.000 Why not just go to one foster home and just live there until someone from your family of origin returns or until you age out and turn 18 and move away?

00:20:02.000 Why do you get relocated to so many different placements, as they call them?

00:20:07.000 And the reason, one reason is that this, essentially, if you stay in one home for too long, it can create issues of conflicting loyalty.

00:20:16.000 So typically what happens for foster kids is that someone from the family of origin returns, whether the mother sobers up or the father enters the picture or a grandmother or an aunt and so on.

00:20:27.000 So usually a kid only stays in the foster care system for a few months, maybe a couple of years at most.

00:20:33.000 Yeah.

00:20:33.000 But if a kid has been living in one home that entire time, and then suddenly the mother reappears and says, okay, I'm good to go.

00:20:40.000 We can take care of the kid.

00:20:41.000 Well, if the kid's been living with another family for two years, the kid is going to be very reluctant oftentimes to leave that new family.

00:20:46.000 And this can create issues with the family as well, that if they've been supplying care for a kid and nurturing a kid for two years, they're going to be reluctant to let the kid go as well.

00:20:55.000 And so the system has organically developed this You know, I guess from the adult's point of view, maybe it seems understandable from the child's point of view, it's actually very cruel to move the kid around all the time so that the kid never grows attached to anyone.

00:21:10.000 And that was what happened in my case.

00:21:13.000 You know, my mother was deported.

00:21:15.000 That was not her first run in with law enforcement.

00:21:16.000 So she was deported.

00:21:17.000 No one knew where my father was.

00:21:19.000 So I was in this, you know, I got absorbed into this vast bureaucratic system bouncing around homes.

00:21:26.000 You know, it was really difficult experience for me.

00:21:31.000 It wasn't just the fact that I didn't know where I would be living week to week or month to month, but sometimes I'd move to a home, make friends with some of the foster kids, one of my foster siblings, and then the next day they would be gone because they would be taken to another placement or they would return to their family.

00:21:51.000 And so there was a lot of uncertainty on my end for where I was going to live, but also who's going to be here tomorrow.

00:21:58.000 That kind of feeling is just really destabilizing for small kids.

00:22:03.000 So eventually, just before my 8th birthday, I was adopted.

00:22:07.000 And this may be interesting based on some of your opening remarks.

00:22:12.000 So I was adopted by this working class family in Northern California, in this town called Red Bluff.

00:22:18.000 Working class town, my adoptive father.

00:22:21.000 So this was the Henderson family.

00:22:22.000 My adoptive father, he was a truck driver.

00:22:25.000 My adoptive mom, an assistant social worker.

00:22:27.000 Very blue collar, didn't go to college.

00:22:30.000 Working class family.

00:22:32.000 And I was adopted in the late 90s.

00:22:35.000 And by this point, of course, I didn't know this at the time, I was a little kid.

00:22:38.000 But, you know, having read about the ongoing fragmentation of the family in the country, I learned that I was adopted at a unique point in American history where by this point in the 90s, it wasn't just the black family that's fragmenting.

00:22:54.000 Now, a lot of working class white and increasingly a lot of working class Hispanic families are also deteriorating. 0.98

00:23:01.000 And there's a lot of out of wedlock births and single parent homes and a lot of just sort of sort of broken families.

00:23:10.000 And so I was adopted and things were going well for a time.

00:23:15.000 But about 18 months later, my adoptive parents divorced.

00:23:18.000 I saw a lot of this in Red Bluff.

00:23:20.000 Kids in single parent homes.

00:23:22.000 I had a friend raised by his grandmother because his mom was on drugs and his dad was in prison.

00:23:26.000 And so when people think about the broken family, a lot of people will kind of think about that sort of the Moynihan Report era of the broken Black family. 0.76

00:23:35.000 But this is now happening in like working class, white and Hispanic areas.

00:23:39.000 So where I grew up, it was mostly white with a large Hispanic population as well.

00:23:42.000 And so this broken family pattern has been sort of slowly creeping upward along the sort of socioeconomic lines, along sort of whatever degrees of affluence, degrees of privilege and so on.

00:23:58.000 So that more and more, if you want to have an intact family, it seems to be more and more confined to those who went to college, those who break away into the professional middle class or above.

00:24:10.000 And for anyone who's kind of lower middle class, working class and below, it's an anomaly now to see intact married families.

00:24:19.000 I mean, there's so much there that's fascinating to me, Rob.

00:24:22.000 What kind of family or what kind of adult is...

00:24:27.000 I guess you can't generalize it necessarily, but if you had to provide some general categories, is the type of person that chooses to participate in the foster care system, what's in it for them?

00:24:38.000 Is there a financial component to this?

00:24:40.000 Is it mostly out of just their generosity of spirit?

00:24:43.000 Is it a combination of the two?

00:24:46.000 I'd love to understand that.

00:24:48.000 Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, of course, you know, the answers, it's always all of the above.

00:24:52.000 You'll, of course, there are good foster parents.

00:24:55.000 I would say probably the majority start out.

00:24:59.000 You know, who begin fostering probably start out with the best of intentions.

00:25:02.000 They want to provide care for needy kids who have very difficult family lives, whose parents are obviously not in a position to care for them.

00:25:12.000 I think what happens to a lot of foster families is that they become calloused.

00:25:16.000 And, you know, there's only so many times that you can become close with a little kid and see them go away before you eventually start withholding that kind of emotional care.

00:25:29.000 And start to just kind of take the kid in and feed them and keep them alive and sheltered and so on, but you don't get too emotionally invested in them.

00:25:36.000 I think this happens with a lot of families.

00:25:38.000 And the issue is that because, especially in a lot of large cities, places like LA, the system is so overburdened that, you know, there's kind of a tacit agreement that as long as the family, if there's a little bit of neglect, if the care isn't so great, as long as the kid isn't being abused, that, you know, it's better than letting the kid sleep on the street.

00:25:58.000 And so there are also plenty of families that aren't so great and who are in it for the money.

00:26:05.000 You know, you get a stipend for each foster kid that you take in.

00:26:08.000 And so if you can squeeze eight or 10 kids in, some of the homes that I lived in, they were like that, where, you know, it'd be four kids to a room where you'd have two bunk beds.

00:26:16.000 So you'd have two kids on the bottom bunk, two kids on the top, and they try to, you know, maximize the space to take in a lot of kids.

00:26:21.000 And I think a lot of those families were in it for, you know, less than noble reasons.

00:26:27.000 And so there's a variety of these factors.

00:26:29.000 But, you know, I think there's only so much you can ask of adults who repeatedly see, you know, kids coming and going.

00:26:36.000 So ultimately, we want to reach a point, you know, one of the main ideas of my book, we want to reach a point where we have fewer kids entering the system in the first place.

00:26:45.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that that's...

00:26:49.000 I mean, that'd be a great goal to get to.

00:26:51.000 But let's just talk about the system in the first place.

00:26:53.000 Do you think it's a good thing?

00:26:55.000 I understand the basic tension, but do you think it's a good thing that the system is geared towards minimizing attachment?

00:27:01.000 Because it seems like that's been bad both, actually, based on what you just said on the callusing effect for the foster parents as well as the kids.

00:27:08.000 Yeah.

00:27:09.000 But in the interest of presumably protecting the rights of the parent who had their child put into the system in the first place, and those are three different, very competing, difficult interests, what's your perspective?

00:27:23.000 You know, I open in the preface of Troubled with a quote from Nicholas Christakis, the physician and sociologist at Yale.

00:27:32.000 And, you know, his quote was something along the lines of essentially every child care policy in the history of the United States has been geared toward the interests of adults.

00:27:41.000 And what was important for kids was secondary.

00:27:46.000 And, yeah, I understand, you know, you want to prioritize the rights of the parents.

00:27:50.000 That's important.

00:27:51.000 But ultimately, I think we want to do what's right for the kids.

00:27:55.000 And, you know, it's difficult, the attachment issue.

00:28:00.000 But I think ultimately, you know, it's too destabilizing.

00:28:03.000 And it's too emotionally difficult and draining for kids to constantly be moved around like that.

00:28:10.000 It's very novel.

00:28:12.000 I mean, that's like a very unique situation for kids to not know where they're going to be day to day and not know where their foster siblings are going to be day to day.

00:28:19.000 I mean, that's like not, you know, if that's how prisons were set up, I think there would be an outcry.

00:28:27.000 But because these are kids, and because they have no political power, and because they can't vote, and for a variety of reasons, these are just kind of a neglected group of individuals.

00:28:38.000 And I think it hurts people as well to think too deeply about it, to think about kids who are being neglected and mistreated.

00:28:45.000 So it's one of those things that we just want to kind of push to the corner of our minds and not think too deeply about it.

00:28:49.000 But ultimately, I think that the frequent placements are harmful.

00:28:54.000 Mm-hmm.

00:28:55.000 Mm-hmm.

00:28:57.000 And do you think that that trend you pinpointed earlier, you mentioned that your own adopted parents at the end of that cycle, right?

00:29:05.000 So you exited the foster care system.

00:29:07.000 You were formally adopted.

00:29:09.000 They were not a foster family, right?

00:29:10.000 That was a separate family?

00:29:12.000 No, no, no.

00:29:12.000 So how did that work?

00:29:14.000 Yeah, it was interesting.

00:29:15.000 So I was in my final foster home.

00:29:18.000 And yeah, my foster mom at that time, she told me, hey, this new family, they want to adopt you.

00:29:25.000 And so the Henderson family, they came to visit me.

00:29:29.000 And I remember, you know, the moment I knew that it was going to be a different kind of family was when, you know, I always refer to my foster moms as Mrs. So-and-so, and I refer to my, you know, soon-to-be adoptive mother.

00:29:41.000 I called her Mrs. Henderson, and she paused and stopped me and said, you know, you can just call me mom if you want.

00:29:48.000 And I'd never called any, you know, in my memory, you know, I'm sure maybe I called my birth mother mom at some point, but in my memory, at least, I'd never called anyone mom.

00:29:59.000 like I have a real family now.

00:30:01.000 And so, you know, they visited me, we got along, you know, probably from the adult perspective, there was a lot of paperwork and a lot of hoops to jump through, but from my perspective, it was just, hey, this family came, we got along.

00:30:13.000 I moved in with them in their home in Red Bluff, California.

00:30:17.000 And yeah, things went well for a while, but then, like I mentioned, there was a divorce.

00:30:22.000 Did they have other kids?

00:30:22.000 Yeah, they had a young daughter, their biological daughter, who is now my adoptive sister.

00:30:29.000 We're still close.

00:30:31.000 And I talk about the kind of the salutary effects of that relationship, my sister and me, we're still close.

00:30:38.000 And You know, there was this divorce in the family, and my adoptive father stopped speaking with me after the divorce.

00:30:47.000 And so that was, you know, I was nine years old by this point.

00:30:51.000 And so, you know, the series of being taken from my mother, never knowing my father, all the foster homes, then I'm adopted, and then I lose, you know, lose this relationship with my adoptive father.

00:31:04.000 By this point, it was so hard.

00:31:08.000 As a nine-year-old kid, now I'm with a single mom, and my mom is struggling to make ends meet. 0.53

00:31:15.000 She's working overtime to pay the bills. 1.00

00:31:19.000 I was a latchkey kid by this point, so I did what a lot of nine-year-old boys do when there's not a lot of supervision at home.

00:31:26.000 I was this angry kid, so I just hung out with all the other nine, ten-year-old boys in the neighborhood who also had single moms or families that were fragmented and Unable or unwilling to properly monitor what they were up to.

00:31:43.000 So, you know, by this point, at nine years old, we were smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, you know.

00:31:49.000 At nine years old?

00:31:49.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, nine.

00:31:50.000 I mean, I talk in the book about how I started drinking beer when I was five in one of the foster homes.

00:31:55.000 And then by nine, we were drinking tequila and, you know, sneaking Marlboro Reds from my friend's mom and, you know, We'd go to the local gas station, buy some cold medicine, and then see how many pills we could take before we started to feel funny.

00:32:13.000 Eventually, one of my friend's cousins was able to get us weed and moved on to harder drugs after that.

00:32:19.000 And yeah, it's, you know, in a way, all this sounds a little bit wild, but in a way, I'm lucky because this was just before meth really became pervasive in these kind of rural communities in California.

00:32:37.000 Now, if you visit Red Bluff, you see a lot of sort of sunken cheeks and the whole sort of meth look.

00:32:42.000 I mean, it was around, but not like it is now.

00:32:45.000 So I never got into that.

00:32:47.000 Yeah, it's a heart-rending story to hear.

00:32:50.000 I mean, just as a parent myself, it's a part of, I mean, there's so many kids that go through the foster care system.

00:32:56.000 Actually, you probably have the numbers.

00:32:58.000 How many kids in America do go through the foster care system?

00:33:01.000 So it's something on the order of 400,000 at any given moment.

00:33:06.000 400,000 at a given moment?

00:33:07.000 400,000.

00:33:07.000 Wow.

00:33:07.000 Yeah.

00:33:08.000 And I just saw this report in NPR that the number of foster kids has roughly doubled since the year 2000. And the reason seems to be primarily due to drug use, like drug drugs.

00:33:20.000 Abuse, I guess.

00:33:22.000 You know, the opioid crisis, I mentioned meth and a lot of other sort of substance abuse issues.

00:33:27.000 So that usually is the reason why kids enter the system is because of substance abuse from the family.

00:33:36.000 Just plainly, a lot of these kids were already raised by single moms.

00:33:39.000 A lot of them weren't in contact with their fathers or tenuous relationships, similar to my case.

00:33:45.000 And then the mother gets strung out on drugs.

00:33:47.000 Occasionally there's issues of mental illness, but oftentimes the mental illness of the mother is brought on by heavy drug use.

00:33:53.000 And so it really seems to be the increase in the last couple of decades.

00:33:59.000 Primarily drugs seem to be responsible for that.

00:34:03.000 On the adoptions out of the foster care system, those are typically families who are looking to add a child who may otherwise not be able to or past the age of conceiving children in a reliable way.

00:34:17.000 Is that about right?

00:34:19.000 That one I don't know.

00:34:21.000 It sounds sort of intuitively correct, but I don't know the figures as far as how many of these families have no children and look into adopting in that way.

00:34:30.000 I mean, I do know that there is like a very rigorous screening process that typically adoptive families, you know, you tend to have to meet certain requirements, married, certain level of income, and so on and so forth.

00:34:43.000 And so generally speaking, Adoptive families tend to be pretty good. 0.99

00:34:50.000 In my case, though, like I mentioned, I was adopted at a strange point in American history where families in these communities aren't doing so great.

00:35:03.000 Do you think that that was in part Catalyze your family's decision to adopt by the fact that they may have been going through trouble beforehand?

00:35:13.000 It's a good question.

00:35:14.000 I remember I asked my adoptive mom that question and she said no.

00:35:20.000 You know, I mean, memory can be fuzzy.

00:35:23.000 I don't know.

00:35:25.000 But that's what she told me is that, you know, things seem to be going great and the issues in the family didn't seem to occur until a few months into the adoption.

00:35:36.000 But it was shortly after you were adopted that they split.

00:35:38.000 It was about a year and a half after, yeah.

00:35:42.000 And are you still close with your mother?

00:35:45.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:35:46.000 I mean, you know, it can be hard sometimes.

00:35:50.000 I remember being very worried.

00:35:53.000 I sent her some early versions of the manuscript, my book, but she finally sat down and read the whole thing.

00:36:04.000 She said it was hard to read, but she said she's proud of me.

00:36:09.000 She's been telling her co-workers to get a copy of the book, and she's ultimately proud.

00:36:15.000 You know, I get it from her perspective why it would be hard.

00:36:18.000 Part of it was because the first couple of chapters when I focus on my foster care experience, I actually never told anyone about that.

00:36:25.000 She didn't even know about it.

00:36:26.000 She didn't know.

00:36:27.000 She would ask me questions and I'd give these kind of short answers.

00:36:33.000 You know, without a lot of detail.

00:36:36.000 But when I wrote the book, I did want people to get that sort of immersive experience of what foster care is actually like.

00:36:42.000 And so that was the first time I'd ever really communicated those experiences.

00:36:47.000 And yeah, it was hard for her.

00:36:49.000 It was hard for my sister, too.

00:36:51.000 You know, my sister, when we talked about the book, and she read the whole thing, and yeah, I mean, she was crying, and it was really hard for her, because I think she also, a lot of those stories were new to her.

00:37:05.000 And, you know...

00:37:07.000 How old was she when you joined the family? 0.94

00:37:10.000 How old was she? 0.89

00:37:10.000 She was four, so I was... 0.89

00:37:12.000 She was four?

00:37:12.000 Yeah, so she's about three, four years younger than me.

00:37:16.000 Yeah, so she's a little younger, and... 0.95

00:37:20.000 Yeah, so, you know, everything in the family.

00:37:23.000 I mean, we're good now.

00:37:24.000 But, you know, I talk in the book about how once I left for the military, I You know, I stayed in touch with my sister, but for everyone else, I wasn't as responsive or communicative as I should have been.

00:37:39.000 I really was trying to just get away from everything, you know, because it wasn't just the divorce.

00:37:45.000 There were other issues after that, which I delved into in trouble.

00:37:49.000 But, you know, I came to this realization later.

00:37:54.000 It took a long time for me to recognize that You know, I was being selfish and that, you know, maybe at a certain point when I was young, it made sense to whatever, be this angry kid.

00:38:06.000 But eventually, you know, the only way to make the world a better place is to become better yourself.

00:38:12.000 And so, you know, I go out of my way to try to be a good brother and a good son, even if it's not always easy.

00:38:19.000 You know, is that something you came to on your own or was there somebody who showed you the light in that direction?

00:38:28.000 There was probably no one in particular, but just the sum total of the experiences I'd had through my early life, through the military.

00:38:40.000 And then also, I mean, I didn't really hit this realization until I graduated from college, from undergrad.

00:38:46.000 So it took all those experiences.

00:38:47.000 I was 28 when I finally realized that There's a period, I think, for young people, young men, young people in general, I suppose, where initially you want to become self-sufficient, you want to be self-reliant, you don't want other people to interfere with you.

00:39:06.000 You're a little bit selfish because you're trying to become a mature and developed person.

00:39:14.000 But then once you reach that point where you reach some level of maturity and development and self-sufficiency, there's this kind of diminishing returns and I think it starts to backfire and you can start to become isolated and lonely and disconnected.

00:39:29.000 And I think the next step beyond that, this was the conclusion that I drew anyway, was that once you reach that level of self-sufficiency and development, then you have to sort of turn outward and become...

00:39:43.000 A mentor, a reliable person to others.

00:39:45.000 So, you know, this whole time I was attempting not to rely on anyone.

00:39:50.000 And ultimately, I realized that you should try to become the person that others can rely on.

00:39:56.000 Yeah.

00:39:57.000 You know, it's interesting.

00:39:59.000 I think that what you just said about the need for interconnected dependence and not being something to be ashamed of, but something that we can actually fulfill in good ways.

00:40:11.000 I don't think that's at all limited to people who have grown up under challenging family circumstances.

00:40:17.000 I think it's true for all of us.

00:40:19.000 And I just think it's remarkable that you found, even in that most difficult of circumstances, most difficult or certainly difficult of circumstances, I should probably say, you were healthy, you had a lot, you know, else going for you.

00:40:32.000 God, you know, thank God.

00:40:34.000 I think that that's something that you used to You know, reset your journey, but it sounds like a core step in that was joining the military.

00:40:43.000 And I wanted to understand a little bit what impact that had on you.

00:40:47.000 What was the choice that guided you to go to the military?

00:40:51.000 Were you in high school?

00:40:52.000 When did you know you were going to make that choice?

00:40:55.000 It didn't seem like a natural choice relative to the path you were on.

00:40:59.000 Why did you do it and what impact did it have on you?

00:41:03.000 Well, by the time I was, you know, my senior year of high school is winding down, I was barely passing my classes.

00:41:10.000 I mean, I ultimately graduated with a 2.2 GPA, bottom third of my class, you know, just barely scraping by.

00:41:20.000 It was really two older males that I really respected who introduced me to this idea of possibly enlisting.

00:41:32.000 One was my high school history teacher.

00:41:35.000 When I first joined the class, he would get irritated at me because he could tell that I was a pretty bright kid and I was just angry.

00:41:48.000 and unwilling to do homework or any of the assignments and so on.

00:41:53.000 And, you know, eventually, he kind of just stopped badgering me about this.

00:41:58.000 And then we just start talking, you know, we just talk, we talk about sports, or we talk about whatever.

00:42:03.000 And one day, he was like, you know, hey, check this out.

00:42:06.000 And he pulled up a picture of himself on his computer.

00:42:09.000 And he was wearing an Air Force uniform.

00:42:12.000 And he was in the Air Force before he became a teacher.

00:42:15.000 And I thought, hey, that looks pretty cool.

00:42:17.000 And he said, Yeah, you know, you're, you're not exactly on a On an upward academic trajectory, but this may, you know, kind of be an option for you if you want to consider it.

00:42:27.000 And the other person was my friend's father.

00:42:30.000 So for reasons I explained in the book, I actually moved out when I was 16 and moved in with my friend and his dad.

00:42:37.000 And my friend's father had also been in the Air Force.

00:42:41.000 And he talked to me about it and said, yeah, you know, if you're thinking about, you know, kind of Reorienting your trajectory and thinking about your future.

00:42:56.000 It helped me.

00:42:57.000 Maybe it'll help you.

00:42:59.000 I was 17 by this point.

00:43:03.000 I went to the recruiter's office and I signed up to take the ASVAB. This is the military standardized exam, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

00:43:14.000 If you look at the testing statistics and surveys and so forth, it's essentially roughly equivalent to an SAT or even an IQ test.

00:43:22.000 It correlates something like 0.8 with the SAT and a typical IQ test.

00:43:29.000 There's a physical component to it, too?

00:43:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:31.000 So you have to qualify physically.

00:43:34.000 At least when I joined, there was a sort of threshold for push-ups, sit-ups, and a certain time that you had to run a mile and a half in.

00:43:41.000 And so that's the sort of physical part.

00:43:43.000 And then there's the mental part where you have to take the ASVAB. And, you know, here's how sort of unfocused I was.

00:43:49.000 I mean, I'm 17. I signed up to take this test.

00:43:51.000 And I knew the next day when I had to take the test, it was 10.30 a.m.

00:43:54.000 when I was scheduled.

00:43:56.000 And in my mind, that meant I had like a get out of school free card.

00:44:00.000 And so I'm like, okay, well, I don't have to go to school.

00:44:03.000 I don't have to be at this testing place till 1030. So the night before, I'm like with my friends, playing Xbox, drinking Four Loko, smoking weed.

00:44:13.000 They're like, man, I don't have to get up tomorrow till like 945. So let's just, you know, drinking and playing video games.

00:44:20.000 And I barely make it.

00:44:21.000 I get to the testing center, you know, kind of half hungover, probably still a little bit buzzed.

00:44:27.000 I drank a rock star.

00:44:28.000 Can I just ask you a question about that real quick?

00:44:29.000 Yeah, sure.

00:44:30.000 Because what struck me was how remarkable it was for you to go to your guidance counselor and say you wanted to take the ASVAB, but then that's just a remarkable period.

00:44:39.000 You see your history teacher, you see your friend's dad, and then to make that decision at the age of 17 after the journey you had been on is on one hand Yeah, that's interesting.

00:45:04.000 Yeah.

00:45:06.000 I probably something complicated going on there.

00:45:09.000 You know, of course, I wasn't aware of anything like that at the time.

00:45:12.000 I think if you had asked me, it would have just been, hey, like, you know, normally for school, I got to get up at 745. This time, I don't have to get up till 545. So let's go.

00:45:22.000 But, you know, on some level, on some level, I might have been...

00:45:26.000 But you were motivated to do it well.

00:45:28.000 Yeah, well, I think the issue was, and I didn't really learn this until after I joined the military, was that a lot of my potential and a lot of my sort of belief in myself had been kind of undermined by, you know, everything that was around me.

00:45:43.000 And so, you know, I was just surrounded by so many bad influences and so little oversight that it was just very easy to do the easy thing, to do the thing that sounded fun in the moment without thinking too much about what's going to happen tomorrow.

00:45:59.000 So I showed up, I took this test, and this is why.

00:46:02.000 I've written multiple pieces in Boston Globe, I talk about it in my book, and other places where I am a very strong proponent of standardized testing.

00:46:14.000 Because when I took that test and I went over the results with my recruiter, he was like, man, you did great.

00:46:22.000 You qualify for every job in the Air Force.

00:46:26.000 And he showed me how to convert my ASVAB results into SAT scores.

00:46:30.000 And basically, you know, I found out that my score would have been, you know, very high, it was the same as one of my classmates who was going off to college.

00:46:37.000 He was a straight A student, I was like a straight C minus student.

00:46:41.000 And that was the moment where I realized, oh, like, If I had actually applied myself in school, I might have actually been college material.

00:46:49.000 But as it stood, I was not on that track.

00:46:53.000 But that was the first time that seed was planted in my mind.

00:46:56.000 Like, oh, you have this potential.

00:46:57.000 You could go to college if you want.

00:46:59.000 And I think there are a lot of kids out there who come up in similar circumstances to me who, for whatever reason, maybe they are good students, but they have to work a part-time job and they have to care for younger siblings, and so they can't do all their homework and they can't get good grades, but they can set an afternoon aside and take the SAT or the ACT, and that will provide information about them that their GPA alone wouldn't reveal.

00:47:23.000 And I'm kind of giving the kind of positive example.

00:47:26.000 Or you have kids like me who are just in these kind of circumstances where there was no discipline and no oversight, and I was just sort of indulging my hedonistic impulses.

00:47:37.000 But I was able to exert a little bit of self-control for whatever it was, three and a half hours, and take that test.

00:47:43.000 And that opened up, in my mind at least, other possibilities.

00:47:49.000 And so, yeah, from there, shipped off, you know, graduated, shipped off to basic training in Texas, and yeah, spent the next eight years, you know, learning how to become a functioning adult.

00:48:01.000 That was eight years?

00:48:02.000 Yeah, it was eight years.

00:48:03.000 So I did four years.

00:48:04.000 I mean, so I joined when I was 17, signed up for four years.

00:48:07.000 And then, you know, I think I was like, as my 21st birthday was approaching, and my enlistment was coming to an end, I think I knew I wasn't ready.

00:48:20.000 I wanted to go to college.

00:48:22.000 By that point, it was in my mind, okay, I should go to college.

00:48:24.000 Maybe I'll go to a community college, rack up some credits and transfer, something like that.

00:48:29.000 But I think on some level, I was aware that even after four years, I still hadn't matured to the point where I could just become a civilian again, enter the real world without all of the rigid constraints and boundaries and expectations that the military Built around me.

00:48:47.000 And so I enlisted for another four.

00:48:48.000 And then at 25, I was ready.

00:48:51.000 You know, it took a full eight years before I could finally, you know, become a self-sufficient and functioning adult.

00:49:02.000 I think your story is so interesting because we spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of my time even during the presidential campaign and afterwards.

00:49:09.000 Detailing the importance of having a stable family upbringing.

00:49:13.000 And you can go through all the data at the population level that tells you why that's going to be better for high school graduation rates, staying out of crime, economic prosperity, long-run happiness.

00:49:25.000 You list the metric.

00:49:27.000 A stable family as a foundation is a good formula to get there.

00:49:31.000 And yet, That's a wish for the long run, maybe a vision for the long run, that we're far from realizing today and you have, as you said, 400,000 kids in the foster system at any given time, but that's a small fraction of the total number of kids who still grow up in broken family environments, to put it bluntly.

00:49:51.000 And yet...

00:49:53.000 You have, in every sense that most parents and kids could imagine, have achieved success at the highest level of not just educational or material success, but even in having your own grounding and sense of purpose and ability to communicate and reckon with your own story.

00:50:13.000 Something that every parent would want for their kid.

00:50:16.000 And so in some ways, the more interesting discussion that we don't often have is not just about the importance of the nuclear family versus a nontraditional or broken family, but for kids like you who did find themselves in tougher family circumstances, what's the right way to still allow every one of those kids to live the life that you have ever since?

00:50:40.000 That interests me.

00:50:41.000 Yeah, this is something that I I grappled with in my book quite a bit because I, you know, I didn't, you know, there are multiple ways to read it.

00:50:51.000 You could just read it as that sort of conventional, you know, bootstraps kind of story where, hey, you had this kid with this hard life and whatever, he joined the military and worked really hard and turned his life around.

00:51:02.000 And, you know, that is, you know, that is sort of factually, you know, to some extent with some caveats and setbacks, but that is what happened.

00:51:09.000 Yeah.

00:51:11.000 But I also wanted to describe the kind of modal outcome, you know, the typical outcome of what happens to young boys in particular in these environments.

00:51:22.000 So I concentrate on the stories of a lot of my friends in Red Wolf, California, who, you know, they weren't in foster care, but, you know, again, raised by single moms.

00:51:31.000 I had a friend raised by a single dad, raised by a grandmother because whatever, dad was in prison, those kind of stories.

00:51:37.000 And yeah, where did those friends end up?

00:51:39.000 Well, of those five close friends that I had in high school, two of them went to prison.

00:51:44.000 I had one friend who was shot to death.

00:51:46.000 You know, other friends, you know, they're working kind of menial blue collar jobs.

00:51:50.000 I had one friend who did eventually go off and join the Air Force, and he's doing pretty well.

00:51:56.000 The typical outcome is something like maybe prison, maybe you get shot, maybe you work a dead-end job without not a lot of bright prospects in your future.

00:52:11.000 I wanted to highlight that my path is not It's probably not replicable for the vast majority of kids, whether in foster care or in poverty or in the kind of squalor that I grew up in.

00:52:29.000 Ultimately, we want to create a society, I think, that provides multiple sources of meaning and fulfillment beyond the conventional, you know, go to college, maybe go on to grad school, get into the best school you can get into with some brand name, reputation, and then go off and make a lot of money.

00:52:51.000 Those are all great things, and at least for me, in my position, I'm glad that that's the direction my life took, and it's better than not having those things.

00:53:00.000 But ultimately, I think we're focusing on the wrong metrics of success.

00:53:06.000 So first, I think we should be focusing on what happens before the age of 18 than after.

00:53:10.000 So there's a lot of conversation in the U.S. about upward social mobility.

00:53:14.000 How do we get more poor kids into college? 0.95

00:53:16.000 How do we get more Black kids and Hispanic kids and kids from the inner city and kids from poverty and so on to get more degrees?

00:53:25.000 Enter the middle class. 0.86

00:53:27.000 Fine, those are laudable goals.

00:53:31.000 But for a lot of those kids, getting a degree and getting a high-paying job isn't going to erase all of those early life experiences they had of being neglected or feeling unwanted or watching your mom get high on drugs and neglect you, those kinds of things.

00:53:53.000 So what's happening in the family?

00:53:55.000 What's happening at home with these kids where they spend most of their time, even if they go to a great school?

00:54:01.000 I make this point in the book that even if I had gone to some fancy private school, I was still going to go home to the kind of squalor and neglect.

00:54:09.000 And so even if you have the greatest schools possible, if the family life isn't fine-tuned for that kid, then their future isn't going to look that bright.

00:54:20.000 And so that's one thing, what's happening before 18 rather than what's happening after.

00:54:24.000 And then what is happening after 18, I don't necessarily think, in the case of my friends, even if they had been raised in the best possible family environment, I'm not entirely convinced that they would have gone on to college.

00:54:38.000 They were just not that academically oriented.

00:54:41.000 I was by far the most academically inclined, and even I was barely passing my classes.

00:54:48.000 And so I'm just skeptical that, you know, the sort of college career track, that track is the bright one for everyone.

00:54:58.000 So yeah, I do think that there are other options we could have.

00:55:01.000 How do people find fulfillment in their life?

00:55:03.000 And I think this ties back to the luxury belief idea.

00:55:06.000 If you are an upper middle class person with degrees from a fancy college and you have an interesting and creative job, you can find meaning and fulfillment that way through learning, through traveling, through your job, what have you.

00:55:18.000 For the vast majority of people, though, how do they find sources of meaning?

00:55:22.000 They usually find it through family, through marriage, through community, through social relationships.

00:55:29.000 And unfortunately, those are all Coming apart in a lot of these communities where marriage rates are down, rates of social trust are declining, social capital is down, neighborliness, all those kinds of things.

00:55:46.000 And so, you know, when I think about my friends Yeah, again, I don't think they could have gone on to college, but I don't think they had to go to prison.

00:55:58.000 So I'm not sure how much we can raise the ceiling for a lot of these kids as far as what their sort of upward potential is, that kind of upper bound.

00:56:09.000 But I do think there's a lot we could do to raise the floor as far as how far down these kids fall down the track.

00:56:17.000 So, yeah, how do we shore up sources of meaning and fulfillment for more people that doesn't involve just, you know, paying a college a lot of money for a degree and then going on to some white collar job?

00:56:29.000 Yeah, and what would be your answer to that?

00:56:34.000 Yeah, yeah, that's, you know, I think that probably promoting marriage isn't a bad start.

00:56:42.000 What does that look like though?

00:56:43.000 Yeah.

00:56:44.000 So it's a good question.

00:56:46.000 I think that there have been some successful public awareness campaigns.

00:56:52.000 For example, if you look at rates of smoking over time, since the 1980s, the number of Americans who smoke has dropped by half.

00:57:03.000 And some of that, of course, is, you know, there are sort of economic incentives that play syntax and increasing prices of cigarettes and so on.

00:57:10.000 But I think a lot of it had to do with the norms around smoking changed.

00:57:15.000 When I was a kid in the 90s, every time I turned on the television, like every third commercial was like, you know, some anti-smoking ad or like some woman with the I don't know what they call it, the tracheotomy or something with a hole in her neck.

00:57:27.000 And it was just like repeatedly inculcated.

00:57:29.000 Don't do this thing.

00:57:30.000 It's bad for you.

00:57:32.000 I think that we could do something similar in the opposite direction with marriage if we could communicate to young people that, for example, a lot of people are familiar with the statistic that married people tend to be happier.

00:57:45.000 Children who are raised by two married parents tend to be less likely to go to prison or more likely to graduate from high school and go on to college and so on and so forth.

00:57:52.000 So all of the benefits I think people have a kind of intuitive, vague awareness of these benefits, but to repeatedly sort of underline it and highlight it and so on, I think that would probably have some nonzero effect on people's behavior.

00:58:07.000 Because even if you know something is good for you, being repeatedly reminded of it does have some effect on behavior.

00:58:16.000 I mean, there's a reason why every single pack of cigarettes has that black lung with the warning label on it.

00:58:20.000 It's like, who doesn't know smoking is bad for you at this point?

00:58:23.000 But having that sort of norm repeatedly reinforced all around you, that does have some effect on behavior.

00:58:29.000 And I think this would have some influence on marriage rates.

00:58:34.000 And that's just sort of a starting point.

00:58:36.000 And you're not necessarily talking about through the government.

00:58:39.000 It could come through culture and other vectors as well.

00:58:40.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:58:41.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:58:42.000 I think that people who are in prominent positions, podcasters and writers, people like you and me, and people who do similar kinds of work, I can highlight this and say that, you know, marriage has benefits for you.

00:58:58.000 It has benefits for your spouse, for your family, for your kids.

00:59:01.000 You know, I'll tell you this very brief story.

00:59:04.000 So I had two conversations recently with two guys in their 30s.

00:59:09.000 Both of them were married for a few years, had young kids.

00:59:13.000 And they were telling me, you know, they both told me essentially the same story, which is that they'd been married for a little while.

00:59:19.000 It wasn't quite as, you know, interesting or exciting as they thought it would be.

00:59:25.000 The marriage felt a little, you know, stultifying, a little dull.

00:59:29.000 And they were kind of thinking, maybe this isn't right.

00:59:33.000 Maybe I'm not supposed to be married to this person.

00:59:35.000 You know, yeah, I have kids, but, you know, they were kind of getting a wandering eye and kind of thinking about other possibilities.

00:59:43.000 And then they told me they had read something I had written, either on my substack, one of them was my book, the other was my substack, and then they decided to renew their commitment to their wives, to their kids, to their families, and decided, no, that was just me kind of being a little bit selfish and not realizing, you know, there are people who rely on me.

01:00:05.000 You know, I have kids, I have a family here, and They decided that wasn't the right path for them and that, you know, sticking with the family was the right move.

01:00:12.000 And I'm just a guy with the substack, right?

01:00:13.000 And, you know, I have a little bit of a platform here.

01:00:15.000 But I do wonder if that was scaled up, right, to, you know, the level of prestige media, to glossy magazines, to Netflix shows, to everything, right?

01:00:25.000 Like, if that was the kind of message that people were receiving, like, yes, if you're married to someone who's a horrible abuser, who's, you know, mistreating you in a terrible way and so on, like, yes, that's probably a bad situation to be in.

01:00:36.000 But the typical divorce is usually, you know, something to do with boredom or unfulfillment.

01:00:44.000 And so that's kind of on the sort of middle, upper middle class end.

01:00:47.000 A lot of working class and poor people aren't even, they're not getting divorced because they're not getting married in the first place. 0.74

01:00:51.000 So there needs to be different messaging.

01:00:53.000 But on the one hand, yeah, sort of promoting marriage.

01:00:55.000 And then the other is sort of reaffirming the commitment to people, to your spouse and to your family.

01:01:02.000 You know, it's interesting.

01:01:05.000 I know a lot of friends who are in this position that You probably had people who reaffirmed that family unit and stuck through it, where you see, in a very different context, what feels like a very different kind of divorce, a divorce that happens after the kids are out of the house again, right?

01:01:23.000 Or in college, or maybe even wait until they're out of college.

01:01:26.000 And that seems to me like it has a fundamentally different character to it in the impact that that would have on a family.

01:01:32.000 I mean, for obvious reasons, but...

01:01:35.000 I'm curious for your reaction, having yourself thought so deeply about these family structure issues, both in your scholarship and, of course, because of your personal journey.

01:01:44.000 What's your reaction to that and the advice you would give to your guy friends who had the conversation with you they did about weighing their marriage and their family circumstance in the situation with kids versus roll it forward another 15 years or 10 years and maybe it'd be a different story?

01:02:05.000 Yeah, I think that's right.

01:02:07.000 Once the kids are adults and they're out of the house and they have some perspective, I think at that point, I guess if you have...

01:02:17.000 My general stance is if you are just in a relationship, there's no kids involved, what have you, I'm kind of libertarian on that, that you're two adults...

01:02:27.000 You know, do what you want to do.

01:02:29.000 But once you have kids, then I sort of lean into that more sort of social conservative stance of, you know, now it's not about you, it's about the kids.

01:02:38.000 And then once the kids become adults, and they're out of the house, then I kind of revert back to that libertarian stance of, yeah, I mean, it's not ideal, but...

01:02:46.000 The kids will learn to live with it.

01:02:48.000 And you're not breaking up a home anymore, right?

01:02:51.000 You're not breaking apart a family.

01:02:52.000 You're just kind of, hey, telling your kids that we stuck it out for you.

01:02:57.000 Maybe you should be grateful.

01:03:00.000 And there may be a certain phase of not even sticking it out, but there's a family unit that provides you a kind of fulfillment that's different than when you're in your late teens or early 20s.

01:03:14.000 And which might be very different than when you're in your late 50s as well.

01:03:20.000 And it's a life stage question that may, if people see it that way, I don't know if the utilitarian version of this or the utility version of framing it this way is it might actually encourage more people to reframe the way they think about different phases of their life rather than feeling like they're I'm just trying to think about practical ways of improving stable family formation.

01:03:49.000 It's not a particularly conservative or traditional thing for me to say, but it's just a question of whether that might actually lead a lot of people to lead to fewer broken homes in the period where we care most about, which is when the kids are actually in the house.

01:04:01.000 Yeah.

01:04:02.000 No, no, no.

01:04:02.000 Yeah, I'm all about that sort of pragmatic approach.

01:04:06.000 And, you know, I cite studies all throughout my book about How, you know, really the critical years for children seems to be between birth and age five to age seven.

01:04:18.000 That's sort of the most important period of a kid's life.

01:04:21.000 You know, that's sort of how they, you know, the template for all future relationships and, you know, their kind of emotional wiring and all those kinds of things.

01:04:30.000 I mean, those early years are critical.

01:04:33.000 And so, yeah, if there's a way to, you know, the public awareness campaigns or something like, you know, wait till the kids are out of the house before you divorce or something like that.

01:04:41.000 Or just think about it real hard before you have the kids, all right?

01:04:44.000 Before you have kids, think about it.

01:04:46.000 And then after they do, you're in it through graduation, something like that.

01:04:51.000 I'm only half kidding.

01:04:52.000 Yeah, well, I mean, what's interesting here, so I just read this article in The Economist like two days ago, and it was really interesting.

01:05:00.000 I'm still thinking about this, which was that, so I'm sure you're familiar with the ongoing decline in fertility in the U.S. Yes, big issue.

01:05:07.000 There's a fertility crisis.

01:05:08.000 Big issue, yeah.

01:05:09.000 Yeah.

01:05:10.000 And one of the interesting things that this article in The Economist pointed out was that if you break this down by sort of social class, if you look at college educated women, you know, we all kind of, a lot of people have this view that the reason why women aren't having kids is because, you know, education sort of delays child rearing and so on.

01:05:28.000 But The Economist article pointed out that there's only been a very slight drop in fertility rates among college educated women. 0.99

01:05:35.000 It has declined, but only slightly.

01:05:37.000 But if you look at non-college educated women, the decline has been vast, and that actually accounts for most of the fertility decline. 1.00

01:05:44.000 So, you know, it used to be that, you know, non-college educated women tended to have a lot of kids, you know, a lot of teenage pregnancies, children out of wedlock, so on and so forth. 0.99

01:05:53.000 But that category of those women are actually having far fewer kids than they used to. 1.00

01:06:00.000 And I think a big part of that now is because of this growing recognition that, you know, marriage is still an ideal in a lot of these communities.

01:06:07.000 A lot of women still want to get married, even if, you know, over the last few decades they have had kids out of wedlock, they still are usually with the father when the child is conceived, and then usually after a couple of years the relationship falls apart.

01:06:21.000 But what I'm thinking is happening now is that, you know, now that we've been through a couple of decades of these patterns, these women are starting to realize that, you know, actually, the marriage isn't in the cards, even if you have the kid. 0.96

01:06:34.000 And the hope was, have the kid, now you're with this guy, and maybe that'll turn into a marriage.

01:06:39.000 They've learned that that's probably not going to happen.

01:06:41.000 And so now they're just not having the kid.

01:06:43.000 And so now in a lot of working class communities, young women aren't having as many kids as they used to. 0.99

01:06:48.000 And I'm noticing this, that even when I was a teenager in Red Bluff, there were a lot of teen pregnancies, and I'm still in touch with a lot of people in that community.

01:06:56.000 And yeah, the teen pregnancy rates are down, marriage rates are down, relationship formation, all these kinds of things.

01:07:01.000 And so all of this is to say that I think the fertility crisis may actually be a marriage crisis in disguise.

01:07:09.000 And that if we focused more on the marriage issue, the fertility issue would take care of itself.

01:07:16.000 Meaning that because fewer people are choosing to have kids out of wedlock, the decline in marriage is actually what's responsible for the fertility crisis.

01:07:23.000 That's my suspicion, yeah.

01:07:26.000 Very interesting.

01:07:27.000 And I think the irony to that is that regardless of whether you're right or wrong about your hypothesis, you get two good things out of acting on it nonetheless, which is not a bad hedge to even be wrong on a hypothesis and you could still get to the right place in the end.

01:07:45.000 I love the way you've thought deeply about these issues with a level that preserves the rigor of your scholarship, but without Smoothing out or papering over your challenging personal journey and rather being really open about it.

01:08:04.000 I think it's a beautiful thing.

01:08:05.000 I think a lot of times you could have somebody that talks about their own story, but Leave somebody in a position of policymaking at a loss for what to do with that, because that's just an N of one.

01:08:15.000 On the other hand, you might have a lot of cold, dry academics that don't have the ability to impart the emotional valence of their work.

01:08:24.000 And I think one of the things that's unique about you is you're able to Draw from a personal experience, but with a rigor that ought to persuade even the most dispassionate of your audiences.

01:08:36.000 And I think that that's a rare combination and one that I would just ask you to put to the good of this country.

01:08:44.000 You've served this country already in many ways, including in the Air Force, and I thank you for your service already.

01:08:51.000 But something tells me that the way you're going to serve this country the most is still...

01:08:57.000 Yet to come.

01:08:58.000 So I wish you the best in that, and I hope this is the first of many more times that we're talking.

01:09:05.000 Yeah.

01:09:05.000 Well, thank you, Vivek.

01:09:06.000 It means a lot.

01:09:07.000 Thank you.

01:09:07.000 Yeah.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - June 05, 2024

Dr. Rob Henderson on How Luxury Beliefs Have Damaged American Society | The TRUTH Podcast #50

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