The Pomp Podcast - #1204 Rob Henderson On Luxury Beliefs: This Idea Will Change Your Life

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Rob Henderson is the author of a brand new book, 'Troubled: A Memoir Of Foster Care, Family, And Social Class.' Rob has pioneered a number of new ideas, such as luxury beliefs, which will make you think much more critically about your life, how society operates, and how you can actually learn from those above, beside, and beneath you in society. We also talk about how these luxury beliefs permeate across all different industries, and different socioeconomic classes. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Rob Henderson is the author of a brand new book, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class.

Rob has pioneered a number of different new ideas, things like luxury beliefs, which will make you think much more critically about your life, how society operates, and how you actually may be able to learn from those that are above, beside, and beneath you in society. I really enjoyed talking to Rob, and I think you'll take a lot away from this conversation. We not only got into our own personal lives, but also about how some of these luxury beliefs permeate across all different industries and different socioeconomic classes. Here is my conversation with Rob Henderson. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Rob here with me. Rob, I thought a great place to start this conversation is this idea of luxury beliefs. You're the first person that I've heard ever bring this up. And it's one of those ideas that once you see it, you can't unsee it. You start to kind of take this framework and start to map it to all these different things in society. But describe first, like, what is a luxury belief? Right. Luxury beliefs, I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And there are multiple components to this concept, this framework. you know, we can, I'll sort of give a summary of the idea and the pieces, and then, you know,

don't jump into questions. And so essentially, you know, historically, the upper strata of society have always found ways to stand out, to distinguish themselves. My claim is that historically, it's been done through luxury goods, through material goods, through the clothing people would wear, the sort of accoutrements they would display, the possessions that they owned. But over time, material goods have become a noisier signal of one's social position. So 100 years ago, you could look at someone and immediately tell whether they were rich or poor just by their appearance and what they were wearing and where they lived and so forth. Whereas today, it's less true. I'm not saying material goods are no longer a reliable indicator of status, just noisier.

However, the upper class today, the cultural elites, the elites of society still want to display their prominence. And so the new way that they do this is through their luxury beliefs, through fashionable ideas, through trends, through holding peculiar and interesting and sometimes bizarre ideas that are at odds with conventional opinion. And this is sort of an expression of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described as cultural capital. So luxury beliefs are a sort of expression of cultural capital. You can only obtain these ideas if you attend an expensive university, you read the right periodicals, you hang out with the right social circle, the right crowd, read the right books. And all of the luxury beliefs, these opinions that you express are indicators of where you stand in society. And we can get into specific examples. What's an example of like a luxury belief that most people would recognize?

Well, the most probably recent luxury belief that I think a lot of people will remember is the defund the police movement. And so this gained a lot of popularity in 2020. At one point, it was abolished the police. Then it sort of shifted to defund the police. And so we've sort of seen some of the consequences of this. So defund the police became fashionable among cultural elites in 2020. And so this shifted attitudes around law enforcement and policing. Some of it was implemented in actual policy in certain states and certain regions.

And various forms of crime have increased since then as a result. But there was a popular, there was a YouGov survey in 2020, which asked a representative sample of Americans, you know, do you want to defund the police, essentially? And the group that was the most supportive of defunding the police, if you break down by income, the highest income category, they were the most supportive by far of defunding the police relative to the middle and lower income categories. I mean also relatedly in I think this was actually in Minneapolis white residents of Minneapolis were more supportive of defunding the police than black residents and so this is a an example defund the police it sounds interesting it makes you sound like you sort of have you like you're on the vanguard of cultural trends and you know saying like rethink reimagine law

enforcement suddenly you sound like sophisticated and interesting but those ideas have downstream effects on less fortunate people who don't wield the same level of influence in society they're the ones who get to pay the cost of those luxury beliefs that garner you status among your peers so when people watch like i'll call it an old school movie or a movie that you know kind of about uh some point in history i think a lot about like the aristocracy right and like these people who were above something that everyone else did right um and what i think i've learned from you which is really interesting is like some of these ideas can morph they can actually be widely accepted in one portion of you know kind of uh income distribution and then those

people can actually turn on the idea and i think hamilton is something that you use as an example maybe you can kind of describe like a luxury belief is not just something that is like a static thing it can actually morph and evolve over time and the wealthiest people can actually turn on themselves in some weird way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's sort of dynamic. I draw an analogy to fashion where once, you know, like a fur coat may become very popular for that season, but once enough people wear it, it sort of loses its status, its legitimacy as a sort of a marker of status. So an example I've given is actually with Canada Goose Jackets. So when I was an undergrad at Yale um you know a few years ago um you know the the the canada goose jacket was very popular in say

like the mid 2010s and then once you were able to get them at discount prices and at outlet stores and so on suddenly you know you don't really see that many canada goose jackets uh on elite college campuses anymore uh and so uh the idea is dynamic the hamilton idea um i i wrote about this in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago, which was that, so when Hamilton first came out in 2015, tickets were inordinately expensive. Only a select few could even get tickets to get access to be able to see this show. And the cultural elites loved it. It was sort of everywhere. Everyone was talking about it. And if you had seen Hamilton, this was like a big deal. Like, wow, you saw Hamilton. Wow. And I remember this is 2015. I looked up tickets and

they were way outside of my my budget as a you know a veteran on in college on the gi bill just you know i wasn't gonna be able to get a ticket for that um but then uh in 2020 uh suddenly disney plus announced that they were going to uh start airing this or start to stream hamilton on their platform and shortly thereafter suddenly people started to turn on hamilton and it became unfashionable. The creator started to sort of broadcast the criticisms of his own show. And people sort of turned on this. And the reason is because it became too popular, became too fashionable. Suddenly everyone had access to Hamilton. It couldn't be cool anymore. It could only be cool if it's exclusive and only a certain number of people have access to it. And

the same is kind of true with luxury beliefs. Once a belief becomes too popular or too widely held, then it becomes passe and people must move on to the next luxury belief. so when you think about um kind of that dynamic nature of it how much of the change is driven by the rich people versus the non-rich people like is it actually the only people who can change the uh kind of position of an idea is the you know if you will like tastemaker like you like you have to be in the luxury belief category to actually be able to say no that idea is no longer luxury or does it come from the other side of the spectrum uh well i think the the luxury beliefs they they have to so so where they originate can vary um some people have asked me you know can

can luxury beliefs go in the reverse direction where maybe they start with the the lower classes and then perhaps like cause cause harm somehow sort of goes the the other way and causes harm to the upper classes i don't think this is the case because the the people who wield the most influence in society are the upper classes so even if an idea originates among sort of more marginalized groups in society. It's the upper class, the people who wield social influence, who get to pick that idea up from them and then amplify it and broadcast it to everyone else. And so, yeah, it can originate with certain groups more than others, or it can originate anywhere, really. But the people who are responsible for broadcasting and amplifying it

are members of the upper class, the affluent. So the affluent and upper class, one of the things I've really wanted to kind of talk through with you is, can it also vary from community to community. And what I mean by this is if I go to Greenwich, Connecticut, I'll pick on them, right? And I say to you, hey, who's the affluent people in Greenwich, Connecticut? Everyone has a generalization in their mind, right? It's like a hedge fund manager, right? Who like, you know, probably has too much money for doing too little. And they set the culture of that area and their peer groups, et cetera. But if I then take you to, you know, I don't know, maybe the 1980s or 1990s, And I ask you, who is setting the culture for hip hop as it's becoming popular?

Those two people don't look alike. They don't make nearly the same amount of money or anything. But in some weird way, you know, what now has become multi-billionaires and very wealthy people from the kind of hip hop community, there was almost this like street culture. And I wonder, is there luxury beliefs, even though it's street culture, even though it's not, you know, the hedge fund community and the super wealthy, can there still be luxury beliefs within kind of these smaller, you know, or kind of maybe not yet affluent communities that are not mirrored by the hedge fund manager, et cetera.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, so there can be the sort of factional elites, different groups, different communities that broadcast the beliefs and hold different kinds of beliefs. That's, yeah, that's an interesting example. I can imagine that, that like if you, within a community, if you hold status within that community however the status is conferred maybe it's it's conferred differently among like uh like uh business moguls or musicians or something versus hedge fund managers and so within that group but i think like there's there's been this sort of convergence among a lot of the elites

where you know if you work in a creative industry or you're a hedge fund manager there's been this this sort of uh integration among cultural and economic elites where you know generally there's a lot of overlap now but i i think that yeah even among the elites in say yeah hip-hop or or or rock or something like that if you sort of earn your money through promoting values that could hurt those below you within that community an example is like a glorification of drug use right like if you're a musician and you're talking about how great it is to do drugs and party and so on if you're you know a multi-millionaire musician you know you can afford whatever potential consequence would result from that you can afford doctors and rehab and therapy and so on to deal

with, uh, uh, spiraling drug addiction, but the people within your community, uh, who, who love your music, if they get into the same sort of habits and lifestyles as you, they don't have the same sort of safety net. And so I think this is something that, that like all of us could, could, could think about when we start to broadcast ideas, when we have platforms and positions of prominence. Another area where, if you take kind of luxury beliefs and you apply it to quote the real world, right, is can it manifest in weird ways? And the example I always jump to is like the opioid crisis. In some way, the opioid crisis is affecting blue collar America, kind of, you know, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, et cetera. On another hand, it's like white women

sitting at home taking pills in the morning, right, who basically don't have a lot of other things to do. Now, those are two overly generalized, uh, kind of groups. They're taking the same exact pill. They're both addicted to it. One starts taking it because they have pain or they're miserable or, or whatever with their day-to-day life. And usually it's money related, et cetera. The other though, like they do share some commonalities. Maybe they actually have some sort of mental pain. Maybe they actually do have some sort of boredom or whatever. It may not be money driven but they're taking that same pill and like is there some sort of stratification or like luxury belief that's manifesting itself in something like the opioid crisis uh potentially i

think the the opioid crisis there are probably multiple moving parts to that and and how luxury beliefs enter in um so essentially i mean there's been this sort of shift in the culture away from promoting certain kinds of values and and i think part of this is because we're reluctant to talk about values. Now, a lot of our discussion when it comes to disparities in social outcomes or why some people are addicted to opioids and so on is because of purely sort of financial concerns. And I don't think this is completely true. I mean, I know there's been sort of shifts around the economy and the Rust Belt and so on, which contribute to this. But also, you know, there are other sources of meaning and value in life beyond your job or beyond how much money you earn.

And we're also seeing among sort of the lower middle and working classes and the people who are lower on the socioeconomic strata, less marriage, more divorce, family formation, a lot of sort of social dysfunction. I mean, I see a lot of this in my own adoptive family as well. I mean, these are sort of working class white people who live in California and Oregon. And I'm seeing the sort of changes over time where my grandparents, my adoptive grandparents, I mean, they were married for 60 years. uh you know never really had any sort of serious domestic issues despite um being poorer than uh my generation or my my parents generation uh my grandparents were poor and yet they had very few uh of these issues and when their children my uncles and you know aunts and cousins and so on like a lot of them actually have issues with opioids with unemployment with divorce with

addiction and all these problems uh despite not having um but despite not being as poor as my grandparents and a lot of this is just sort of changes in the culture access to drug use a lot of these things right like people are earning money from these drugs um people are garnering status for um sort of questioning or challenging or undermining uh values around family formation as well so all of these things i think are contributing to this sort of stratification where if you're an upper class person you're you're educated you've uh lived in a stable environment your entire life you sort of learn that oh if i uh you know if i get married and sort of follow these steps if i work hard and so on even if you say otherwise right this is the

luxury beliefs idea is that you you personally in your private life work very hard but then private or publicly your public opinion is you know all hard work doesn't matter it's all luck anyway or whatever right you sort of downplay it so personally you actually know what you have to do but if you uh come from a less educated more marginalized background and no one is there to guide you uh to tell you to take certain steps to hey if you have children it's probably better to get married first these kinds of things um even if you know it to have it reinforced repeatedly by the people around you the way that you might in an upper upper middle class neighborhood um that can have long-term detrimental consequences and so this is why i think we see a lot of sort

of single parenthood a lot of addiction uh and a lot of other social ills in these communities i've said before that a lot of society's problems not all but a lot of them would be drastically improved and or solved if we just had better parents. Right. And you kind of look around and there's people in the news every single day that do stuff. And you're kind of just like, where are their parents? Right. And it's much easier to kind of come to that conclusion once a young person. Right. Then let's say a 30 or 40 year old person. But there is this element of values. And so Clayton Christensen is very well known for The Innovator's Dilemma, but he also wrote this book, How Will You Measure Your Life? And in it, he talks about, you know, there's

an entire generation of people who are basically outsourcing the raising of their children so again probably a luxury belief or related uh if you have access to money and you want to put other things in front of spending time with your child people are like oh i would never do that well you may put them in school for certain reasons you may use in the example of like you keep them in sports because it keeps them constantly doing things and it frees up your time to go do something else yeah you are outsourcing to some degree even if a small degree uh the raising of your children and he says be careful then say don't do it but be careful because you are outsourcing the instillment of the values of your child yeah and so what's fascinating to me is like this idea of

values i think a lot of people would just say like oh there's been a degradation of religion in america and so if religion goes down that's really tied to values and kind of those being reinforced but i don't know if that's necessarily true one and then i guess also are there societies around the world that we could learn from where whether they have high degree of religion adoption or not values have stayed you know kind of a core part of the culture even in the modern world with the internet and kind of all the things that americans have access to but values still persist and they don't seem to have the same problems that we have here or is an international kind of issue yeah it's it's it's a good point um to do the earlier thing you said that about about about

raising uh kids and outsourcing it i think like even even the like the values issue is important But then also, I think it's still a question in terms of how outsourcing kids and having someone else raise them will have not just consequences for what values they hold, but then also sort of their development and self-concept and these kinds of things. A friend of mine, the author Mary Harrington, had pointed out to me the other day, she and I were talking, and she suggested that a lot of the kind of concerns around safety in our culture is due to this sort of hiring of nannies and other people and so on. And her reasoning is basically that if you're a parent and I know you have a young child and you're walking with your child and they're playing on the monkey bars, they're doing something a little bit dangerous or reckless, you're there to monitor them and you'll maybe allow them to take a little bit of risk. But if you're a babysitter or a nanny or a maid, you're not going to let the kid ever do anything dangerous because you're liable for it, right? You're going to be making sure they never do anything dangerous ever. and if the kid grows up that way you know anytime they might do something a bit reckless and the nanny immediately interferes then suddenly concerns about safety take on greater import

right and so this is i think something that that uh at least for me i found that that to be intriguing is basically there's a coddling of the individual not necessarily just a society thing it's because the direct like manager of the child essentially is covering their ass yeah exactly which is it's it's irrational and reasonable from the nanny's perspective to not let the kid do anything dangerous but long term if a kid grows up that way this may have unforeseen consequences and maybe we're seeing some of those those consequences now among sort of upper middle class uh young people um and so the question of values yeah it's i mean it's it's i think those two things kind of they they correlate but i think they they can be separable

i mean they're like the secularization of western societies i think we can see that maybe there was there was uh the morality tied to religion in some way but then there are other cultures uh in In Asia, for example, like in Singapore, they seem to have pretty strong values, despite not being especially religious. Japan as well. I think some of the Asian cultures, there may be a sort of a counterpoint that you don't necessarily have to have strong religion in order to have good social values. But those are very different cultures than the West, right? I mean, it's possible that some cultures actually need religion more than others in order to flourish and for people who are less fortunate to have those cultural guardrails around them. um so so yeah i don't i don't necessarily think religion is is required but if it's if we're not

going to have it it would be i think important one one message i you know i i i would have with these luxury beliefs is that if you um wield any kind of influence in society to to really consider like what what consequences those your your broadcasting of certain beliefs and opinions and ideas we'll have and to consider like you know maybe maybe beyond um a lot of a lot of elites they want to have conversations around money and the way that they think is best to help marginalized and poor and so on the dispossessed is to just give them more money to redistribute money i'm not opposed to economic or financial assistance i think that and it's by and large it's actually a good thing but there are other ways to lead a flourishing life in addition to

promoting sort of economic assistance to also sort of share values that you know can reliably lead to a flourishing life as well mentioned some of them earlier things like like hard work things like marriage things like uh you know putting others needs before your own um a lot of the values that a lot of upper and upper middle class people practice in their everyday lives they uh they're just very reluctant to say publicly uh and often and sometimes i don't play though i mean you and i talked earlier that if you sometimes if you say these things publicly people will criticize you for them i i think we should all maybe uh develop you know a thick enough skin to just say you know i get i get attacked on social media for some things but i

think it's important that these are things that need to be understood and sort of reinforced repeatedly in the culture um how do we do them well i i think yeah firstly a recognition of it right that it is important for us to broadcast uh values and habits that we know can can help not always not in every case i'm you know i'm not saying like you know if everybody works hard then everyone's going to be a millionaire that's not how this you know but on average right like any given person and you can see this with how people communicate with their own children with their own families right i um uh there's there's a story that i've written about before about a friend of mine from high school he he was failing one of his classes so he he was on track to be recruited

to play football for a state school in California and he was failing a class he had to attend a makeup class for two weeks and get a B that's all he needed just attend this class get a B and you could be on your on your on your way to college he attended for three days and then bailed and then you know went and screwed around with me and all of our other friends and just decided not to go he had like the rest of me and my friends growing very little supervision at home i told this story uh to one of my classmates at cambridge and uh and her response was interesting to me she she said like well if that's like what your friend wanted to do and that's who he was like maybe it's okay like maybe he shouldn't maybe he wasn't like messing to go to college

maybe that's not college wasn't for him and i said okay if that was your son what would you done and she said oh i would make sure that he goes to class and i would threaten to kill him if he didn't and uh and i said okay so it's okay for my friends and i to ruin our futures but for your kids it's definitely not right like there's this sort of inconsistent standards in terms of what people are willing to promote when it comes to their own loved ones they want them to do the things that will lead to success but when it comes to others they adopt this sort of non-judgmental impartial oh it's okay you know if that's who you are i don't want to you know i don't want to but you inevitably like that that in itself is a value judgment non-judgmentalism is like i'm

going to step back and not help um or not promote certain values that in itself is a judgment so we don't get to decide not to have any kind of influence on society either way there's going to be an effect on on the rest of society so having this recognition and uh being willing to you know accept some of the slings and arrows for promoting these views i think that would be step one. When you see that happening, right? So I've got a young daughter, uh, too young for me to have to really worry about some of those types of things, but also, um, it's fascinating to me of, um, Hey, let somebody kind of figure their way out versus there is a very direct path, right? And if you want to do X, this is you do a, B and C and some, uh, uh, professions.

It's very clear. You want to be a doctor, got to go to college, right? Like there's not really a path unless you go to college um but then there's other things you know if you want to be uh go to the other end of the stream a painter there's a whole bunch of different ways that you could do including like let's go get some paint you just do whatever you want in your basement right and then you can figure it out from there yeah and so when you kind of look at society in general i do wonder how much of hey let people kind of figure it out versus like the prescription of okay we need more doctors so we need to go and almost look at it as a math problem we need you know 2,000 doctors to graduate this year. That means that we need 10,000 people to start medical school

or, you know, whatever the numbers are. And that means that we need, you know, 50,000 of them to be interested as freshmen in high school and like almost look at it as like these pipelines. And I know companies think of it in some cases like this, especially big companies that are worried about talent, you know, Amazons and people like that. But I do wonder how much of society would benefit from like the schools, right? And I always think about the classic example of the like career development person or like the college counselor type person where i have friends who are like oh i went in and they were like yeah you should go to community college and it's like they're basically taking a student and they're just slotting them into like you're definitely going to community

college yeah and someone along the way was like hey man you can go to a four-year university or like you can do this or this and like show them possibility rather than just like kind of the deterministic path of a college counselor yeah yeah and so like man how important is that person's role, but also like what they're saying to these kids and how much it can really kind of influence what they end up becoming in their life. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result,

Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Yeah, no, no, no. I think that having mentors, having people who can sort of spot potential and to promote it and cultivate it and also just like sometimes kids aren't even aware that they have it. I mean, when I was in school, a lot of teachers would sort of point it out to me. And I think in the moment I, I resisted it and wouldn't take it seriously, but it would remain in my mind. Like it did sort of change my self-concept and my image of myself after a while.

But I think like those two things, like having, having mentors, having, you know, guidance counselors, teachers, other, other adults along the way pointed out that's important. But then also like the family issue is important too, because at least for me and a lot of my friends, um, like it was like, we, we sort of, because we were having the, the, the teachers and people around us recognize this um because our home lives were so chaotic it was just not a priority for us to do well in life so for i'll give you an example so i uh i did really well in middle school um and i got placed into some some higher level courses in high school and i was placed into chemistry and things were suddenly like there was a reversal and things were going

very badly in my life and my family and my grades plummeted and chemistry was actually like a pretty challenging course where i would actually have to pay attention if i wanted to pass it and upon discovering this i was like i am not staying in this class anymore i go to my counselor and i say hey i want to transfer out into uh nutritional science which was like the this is like the dumb kid class like how do i get into that class i've been in that one and uh and i was like this chemistry thing is just too difficult he's like and and this was so the guidance counselor was like hey like you're on track to go to college like you should stay in chemistry and just like put in the effort like don't do this and i was like hey man i'm taking nutritional i don't want

to say this class this is hard and uh he's like okay take this form you know your parents have to sign it and come back and we'll get you transferred in the other class i go home i forge my mom's signature go back and say like get me into nutritional science like and that was a case of me sort of thwarting my own potential that i knew was was there on some level but uh because of of that family piece i just wasn't ready to uh to pursue that path and and and sort of take myself seriously enough to do it. And so there's a lot here going on. And again, this isn't to say that mentorship and guidance isn't important and having teachers and people recognize it isn't important. That was important for me. It just took a while for it to finally click, you know what I

mean? So yeah, just a lot going on with how to shape a young person's trajectory. It's funny you say this because there's a couple of moments, but one specific one I can think of in my life where I still to this day don't know if it was good mentorship or bad mentorship, which is like a very interesting thing right so uh when i was a freshman in college um you get there i'm playing football there's all these older guys right and they kind of they don't want to like be too overbearing but they also are kind of trying to guide you hey man like that class is hard this one's not you know whatever and so uh they all were like like across the board intro to bible gotta take it right okay why they're like trust me and then you're like well explain

why and they're like well you see the teacher she's the advisor to the football team oh got it okay nicest lady in the world right been teaching this class for a long time so i go for the first day and uh she would have everyone stand the classroom's only 35 people 40 people right and so she would have everyone stand up say your name say uh you know what you did on campus or something and like say something interesting about yourself whatever like the the prompt was and so i kid you let's say the room was 35, 40 people, half, 50%. She starts in the front left corner of the classroom. First guy stands up. I'm so-and-so, whatever. I play football. Second person. I'm so-and-so. I play football. Go around the room, up and down the aisles. Half of the people are

on the football team. I remember being like, this is awesome. All my teammates are in here. We're having a blast, like all this stuff. Now it turns out that actually the class was super interesting. she was a fantastic teacher it was basically a guarantee day right so like what they were really kind of giving the mentorship around was like hey this is an easy a go take this class she'll be very sympathetic to football players all this stuff that was true but also it ended up being something that was like so outside of like what you would expect to get in a college classroom that it was like intellectually stimulating and actually what i noticed was like me and a bunch of other people who probably didn't pay attention a lot of other classes we were paying attention

right so like that was like a weird win and i always go back and i'm like did that person give me good mentorship because they guided me to kind of an easy grade like all stuff or did they actually like screw me because what they should have told me was like go take this really hard class where you're actually going to learn something that's applied to like your professional career later on and it kind of depends on like which way you look at it right and so i i tend to think that sometimes advice seems really good at one point in your life you look back like hey that was bad advice because i'm trying to optimize for something else now and vice versa you think something's really bad advice at the time you know for example you're like this guy wants me to stay

in this class you know whatever but no i really want to get into nutrition science and now you might look back you're like i thought it was bad advice then like maybe that was like the best advice he could have given me at the time right yeah it's i think it's it's hard because when people give advice often they're giving advice that they would give to themselves or they're giving advice that that on average is the right advice because you know a guidance counselor can't like take the time to like get to know every single person and figure out like what what they're good at and what their trajectories are but like in that moment like if i was in that guidance counselor's position i would do the same thing i'd be like hey like this is a smart kid trying

to like take a class beneath his ability what are you doing um but yeah and for me it kind of worked out right like everything did end up uh you know being okay in the end but yeah it's it's uh the whole advice giving game it's it's it's tricky right like how to know which advice to give which person and then like when you're in a position where you're sort of giving advice to lots of people and you don't necessarily know like how would how each person would implement it in their individual circumstances. So yeah, yeah. You don't always know. You don't always know. I also think in school specifically, there's something interesting when you look at, let's say high schools as an example. Some high schools will brag about how many of their

students got into college and other schools will brag about how good their school is. And it's like a very weird thing, right? Because like in some way, if you want to brag about on like your homepage, 96% of our kids get into college. A lot of that school is going to be focused on getting kids into college right if instead you're almost like patting yourself on the back and like we're really good at teaching kids but there's no like measurement of it how much of the school is focused on getting them into college versus some other thing that they're optimizing for yeah that's uh is that is that good good hearts law about like anything you optimize forces to become a good metric or something along those lines right i think yeah there's there's

there's some some truth to that and yeah like on the one hand you want you want objective metrics like yeah like you said like oh we're good at teaching kids well how do i know like prove it and then they give you a number they give you a figure and then suddenly that becomes the thing that they're they're optimizing for rather than teaching kids uh uh well so yeah i think uh that that can be tricky too like how to how to balance those two things that's sort of that holistic approach of like ensuring they're learning but they're not optimizing for the wrong thing or or getting people to to sort of hack those those numbers which a lot of these a lot of these elite universities do this like i remember when i when i applied for college and i saw on the home page

it was something like 98 of our students graduate right 98 graduation rate and i was like this is unreal like you know because i'd gone to night classes at a community college before like i was you know just i just knew that like there's a lot of dropouts and a lot of like you know a lot of other colleges and so when i saw 90 i'm like this is why and then i get there you know i get to yale for undergrad and i learned that like the reason why it's 98 is because no one is allowed to fail basically like if you if you actually don't uh like pass if you don't do any of the assignments like the professors will find a way to like get you to make it up because it's uh it's a huge hassle for them to fail a student i'm like wait a minute so like you get a degree from here but

it's kind of like you like they they rig the system so that you can graduate and that's like that's not a good like that number on the website obscures a lot of information how much of an elite university is the selection process ends up determining the elite you know element of the school versus the actual um you know kind of experience or the curriculum because i didn't go to an ivy league school but i went to a school most people i think would consider is pretty good bucknell university and same exact experience like i think you can get an economics degree you have to take like six economics classes right and you're like hey man we're here for like four years right like you know like like i don't want to say it was easy because i didn't do well to

begin with right uh and kind of learned how to do college later in in uh my time there but it was very much this weird thing of like it's so hard to get into these schools and then once you're kind of there it's unclear is it like the system is set up that way is it just like you become part of the herd because everyone else is doing it so you start to like mimic their behaviors and like that helps you get through i don't know what do you think i think there's a like all of those things are probably true i mean they're really um i remember the like one of the first professors i ever met uh when i when i transferred in they they you know he told me um yeah it's really hard to get in and then it's really easy to graduate and uh like huh and so and i've heard other people

basically suggest that it's not the degree that matters it's the admissions letter like that's actually what what is important for for sort of indicating someone's uh underlying talent or ability and so then the process of of education yeah i think like networking sort of learning um you know a lot of the the sort of the decorum and the behavior and like how to how to sort of be around these kinds of people going to job fairs and sort of learning what what possibilities are before you i think all of that stuff is important but in terms of like actual like academic learning i don't think there's a lot of that going on uh and a lot of that sort of washes out too i mean there's been some interesting studies on on education where you know you take you take

freshmen and then you test you know you test them on some material when they're freshmen test them on the same material when they're seniors. And oftentimes there's not, there's not a lot of, not a lot of learning going on. So I think a lot of those soft skills may, may be involved, but, but those are sort of inadvertent, right? Like that's not ostensibly what college is for us, not to teach you those soft skills, but those are arguably the only real benefits you, you obtain in social connections. You were in the military first and then went to college. Um, so just by that alone, you had to be older than most of the people that you were going to class with as an undergraduate. Um, what was that experience like? And was that a thing that helped you or was that,

Maybe something that you felt like was a setback. It's a good question. I probably, well, it probably helped me in that when I was 17 or 18, I wasn't, I wasn't ready or disciplined enough to have been a good student on my own. Like military taught me basically like how to be self-disciplined, how to stick to good habits, how to, I mean, how to be punctual. I mean, I was such a mess when I was a teenager, man. And so, you know, having that structure around me and sort of inculcated within me by the

time i got to college when i was 25 and i was i was i was you know technically i was seven years older officially but i felt like i was 10 plus years older because like the military ages you and it is a different kind of life where you're actually like a full-fledged adult right and now you're with 18 year olds who are kind of like like a residential campus is basically uh like like like high school for another four years and so they really seem so young to me uh like the ways they thought about the world and plus there were all these sort of cultural and class differences as well between me and them um so initially i did my best to sort of fit in and to try to um fit in is the right word but like try to try to like bridge divides and try to like

take an interest and make friends and so on and it worked initially but then yeah the a lot of the sort of the the class and cultural divides became so apparent especially like you know once i learned about like how much sort of activism and how much um you know at that point cancel culture didn't yet exist, but it was starting and I was seeing students trying to get professors fired, trying to ostracize students, trying to pressure the president and the administration to bend to this and that demand and seeing students claim that, you know, they were in danger or that words were violence or harmful. When I had spent, you know, my early life living in like poor and working class communities i lived in foster homes i was in the military and now i'm in one of the like most

probably the safest and cleanest and nicest places i'd ever been and now i'm seeing the children of millionaires say they felt unsafe at this you know fancy rich college and i'm like what is happening here and so that like that kind of um you know that that was it was exasperating to see all of that and that was like my introduction to what that was like and that's why i've you know this sort of all of these experiences informed this luxury beliefs idea of like, this is where it all came from. This is fascinating to me because take random student says that they feel unsafe. Do you believe that they actually thought they were unsafe?

And the reason why I asked that is like, how much of it is if you've never been exposed to any of those other situations, like this actually may be the most unsafe thing that you've ever done. But going back to the idea of like the nanny is constantly coddling you, right like living on your own is unsafe right like you've never had to experience anything in the world now all of a sudden somebody says something mean to you like it's literally they might as well shoot you like it's the worst thing that ever happened to you i think or do you

think it's just complete bullshit i think it's it's it's both i think that there are i think there are true believers who like legitimately feel um some kind of anxiety or panic when they're challenged on their views or when they hear something that they disagree with it really feels uh like an existential crisis to them that someone could challenge that um and then i think there are a lot of others who are sort of cynical they're duplicitous like they understand that in the game yeah they know that if they use certain buzzwords that they're they're odds of gaining some kind of advantage increase and i would say like those that's probably uh like the numerical minority maybe 20 30 percent of people think that way i would think that the vast majority like when

they say they feel unsafe they like they literally feel like oh like i feel physically uncomfortable and they equate that with a sense of danger maybe because they've never experienced any kind of hardship before i mean i think even things like like like um physical soreness or injury i mean interestingly a lot of the people that i got along with were like well other other veterans or like athletes or people who had summer jobs you know these like students who had those kinds of experiences were like they were physical in some way before they spent you know now they're on a campus and they're spending a lot of time in a classroom um someone who like understands like that physical part of life that like actually pain and suffering and danger like you know it's it's

an actual like physical embodied thing there's a difference between that and you know hearing someone insult you or say something rude or impolite or inconsiderate or or or even offensive right like there's a difference between between those things and a lot of these students a lot of these a lot of graduates of these places like they never really learn even even small things like like driving i realized like like there's there's like recent studies showing that like a lot of young people don't want to drive anymore um and i think like there's this there's this kind of like this fear of like being unsafe being uh in a in a in a position where they could potentially be in danger not just like physically like oh another car could hit you but like the feeling

of driving is like it feels you know like like uh uh you could potentially be at risk and so i saw this with like a lot of these students right like you go you know they get their license maybe when they're 17 years old or something they go to college then they take ubers and they've never actually they've never even had to drive which was like this is like a weird thing but like this is something that i noticed like i picked up on because like in the military like i was driving you get it you have to to get to work to commute and so on and then i get to college like these kids don't know how to like they have a license but they don't know how to drive they're scared of driving you know like i rented some car i rented a car with some friends they're like

can you drive rob because like i don't know like why don't you drive like i was it was amusing for me to like watch them drive because i'm like you're an adult and you don't know how to drive a car like what's wrong with you so yeah this is um oh yeah the the standards are are just you know different depending on on like how fast you grow up you know what is uh what's fascinating about what you're describing is uh i was in college then i deployed and i came back to college and i might as well been two different people right because of a lot of these experiences and um if i had to point to one thing it was like the people in college who have never had some of these other experiences like college is the bubble it is the world right of like everything

that exists in my life is like on this campus or like within you know two miles of it what parties the people like all this stuff maybe i heard about something on the internet that happened somewhere else but like that's like basically might as well be in a you know a different continent right everything about their life is like insular in that college campus the second that anyone has like real life experience and they go to college campus like these people are fucking insane like you're looking you feel like almost like you're like staring into a snow globe right that's great yeah like you kind of like got outside right and now you're like looking in and you're like by the way like i get how it works inside the snow globe yeah and like yeah i can

get in there and like i can pretend to walk down the street you know i can pretend to sit in the classroom sure i'll play along right but you realize like there is something outside of the snow globe yeah and i've always thought that like this episode is brought to you by accenture when your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Man, how impactful would it be just when there

was two months before people went to a college or whatever, you don't have to send them around the world, but like just some other experience outside of just like classroom from K through 12 that you could give them. So they realize like you are in a snow globe. Yeah. Right. And like how much would that change the college experience? Cause it actually probably, they would learn more. they probably take more seriously like there's all these things that they would get from it and you don't have to do anything other than just like put them in a different environment for some short period of time let them see something else and then put them right back and like could you i don't know if i told you that increased test scores by you know 10 or they got you know better

jobs at the end or whatever people would rush to do it we just don't think of it that way yeah yeah i i think yeah well well having those experiences yeah if it's um especially if there's a bit of suffering and a bit of struggle and a bit of sort of problem solving involved i think that can go like yeah that can go a long way uh instead of you know like a lot of a lot of you know they'll take like a gap year but then they'll travel to paris or something you know like that's not like a travel to you know it's a different snow globe right they feel like they're well traveled because they've gone to other you know rich countries in in expensive cities you know now they feel like they're sort of worldly or sophisticated but you know instead it might be

worth going to like a developing country somewhere the more impoverished or even within your own country to find find a place and just you know get a summer job working minimum wage and like renting your own apartment and just living that life for a little while just to see what it's like before you go on to you know go on to to the bubble so yeah i think that could that could go a long way um a lot of people talk about national service i don't i don't necessarily think that's feasible you know whether it's military or like peace corps or something else like i think it be nice in an ideal world i think i think practically it would be very difficult to implement but you know in in what what what young people could do you know when they're 18 is to

just sort of on their own decide like before i go off to college i'll take a gap year and do something um i have a friend who thinks that uh we should send every high school senior for a week to pick up trash in their local town that would be great yeah and i'm asking why he was like forget like all the hardship like all stuff he's like how many high school seniors have walked around their own town yeah right like in today's day and age like they sit in a room somewhere and they press a button and shit shows up right packages food cars like like literally he's like how many of them could even tell you the names of the streets from memory of their own town and i'm like man that's great yeah and then you know he's like and then pick up trash because

like well if you're gonna walk the streets you might as well like do something yeah and so it's fascinating to me like that's such like a stupid idea yeah but like yeah actually i bet you most high school seniors probably have not walked around yeah miles of their local town and could name the streets yeah i think yeah that's that's yeah that's interesting that this this is kind of a new phenomenon that like now they don't know the names of the streets or or even traveled much further than than you know a few blocks within their neighborhood um i think also having that sort of um having those difficult experiences struggling a little bit and sort of building up those inner reserves of stamina can be important too uh i watched this tiktok video a few weeks

ago of this kid um or this you know this young army recruit going around his bunk and uh and he was asking these these other guys uh hey you know hey jones if you could talk to your recruiter right now what would you tell him and all these you know these are like 18 19 year olds and they're like you know i'd say fuck you or like i hate you or why did you do this to me and so on and i'm watching this and i'm like man like other other young people are going to watch this and they're gonna think like oh the military sucks blah blah i'm not gonna join or if they were gonna join maybe this is gonna change their mind but the thing is like in the moment it does suck like i as i watch this i have these memories of like yeah like i know how they feel like that's awful

like because you know your recruiter tells you one thing and then things kind of go different you're doing push-ups in the sand exactly and uh but like for the rest of my life at least like as i think back and i talked to other guys about this maybe you've had this experience too where like you can look back on that like i went through that and i feel stronger now and i know that like i can handle other challenges now as a result of those experiences or like however much life sucks now at least like you know i didn't pull like two all-nighters and now they're making me run 10 miles or something like that right now i can now you know what you're capable of you sort of know uh where the edges of your your your strengths are uh but in the moment right like

yes it sucks and and i think we're we sort of uh you know culture is sort of going in this direction we're like no one should ever feel any discomfort no one should suffer any more than they have to like no one should do anything they don't have to do and so on and there's some truth to that but when you're young i think it's important to sort of test yourself a little bit and it's important to to struggle a bit uh as well i mean you know thinking about like all the the difficult things that i did as a kid and like now like so so i had a i had a teacher in high school and and i always remember this even when i was young there was something that clicked for me i had a teacher in high school who worked uh at a lumber mill before he became a teacher and so i remember one

day in class um i was like i don't know maybe 15 16 years old one of the students asked him uh is it hard being a teacher and he responded like no like yes is it hard work being a teacher and the teacher was like that's not hard work being a teacher he's like i'm sitting here sipping coffee reading books with you guys in an air-conditioned building he's like i used to work at a lumber mill he's like backbreaking work you know 10 hours a day sunburned like you know sweating like you couldn't sit down you couldn't even he was like telling us we couldn't even talk like sometimes i talked to i have the other the manager would be like hey no talking you know back to work like that kind of job right and now you're a teacher no one controls you he's like and so like he

understood right like how how fortunate his life is now and so now like when you when you go from like that kind of physical labor to like working a more sort of white collar uh sedentary job you understand like how lucky you are right how many of your college friends are like your high school friends or were they very different they're they're so so different man um i just had just had lunch with a friend of mine from college so i was i was just on the west coast you know visiting and um a friend of mine one of my oldest friends i lived with him my senior year of high school and he caught me up on what was going on with our high school friends and you know so talk yeah yeah one of those like hey what's going on with people you know what's going on with so and

what happened to him and uh and like and so i had five close friends in high school there were six of us none of the six of us and this is like this is common where i grew up in california none of the six of us were raised by both of our birth parents so it was me raised in foster homes my friend that i met uh you know just uh recently he was raised by a single dad who had been married and divorced five times uh another friend raised by a single mom another friend raised by his grandma because his dad went to prison and his mom was addicted to drugs like this is like know this these were the stories of where i came from and so my friend is telling me about uh you know all these guys we went to high school with and like you know one of them recently went back

to prison the other one recently reconnected with his dad so he grew up his whole life never knowing his dad right his dad contacts him out of the blue on facebook and was like hey son i want to meet with you they go to meet at a restaurant and my friend my old you know we haven't talked in a few years but he's talking to this he's like like where like what i never you've you've been gone my whole life now you want to like re-enter and be my dad this is ridiculous and they talked for a little while and it seemed like it wasn't going in a good direction and then suddenly they're doing cocaine in the bathroom together right like the dad thought that like the way to get his son back my friend back into his life was to bust out the drugs because he knew my friend like they'd both

been you know uh involved with drugs before and so like those are the you know that's you know what i mean like these like these kind of like a father-son ripping along right exactly like literally they're at a diner ripping a line you know doing cocaine together and like that was the kind of guy this he was which is kind of unsurprising because he'd not been in my friend's life and so that's who he was and yeah other friends you know just sort of menial jobs you know like the this friend that i met had like like sort of the best life out of the six of us because he joined the air force like i did and now he's sort of in this holding pattern you know taking one class at a time at community college working part-time at a restaurant like his life

is like okay but um yeah that's like those are that's sort of and then my college friends right like completely different guys working at hedge funds guys working in consultancies tech like just wildly ripping lines in the bathroom right but that's adderall not uh not okay and uh and so it's just uh i get this sense of whiplash and i'm i'm like it's still like a this sort of a conflict for me of like how to do this about like how to how to go back and and and still remain you know to keep those ties going with my old friends because i don't want to lose that um but then to have these new you know these new friends this new set of friends who i like too and and we get along for different reasons but yeah to sort of walk that tightrope who are you more comfortable

talking with ah that's a tough question um i'm comfortable talking with each group more comfortable about different things so with my high school friends i'm more comfortable talking about like like past mistakes and failures and you know the stupid things that we did as kids and and my concerns about some of the things i'm doing now and relationship stuff family stuff like personal personal issues i'm more comfortable talking with my high school because we go back right like they know each other since we were kids right well they have context too and with my college friends i'm more comfortable talking with them about like successes and professional stuff and you know what uh what my expectations are for the future right like i i tiptoe around those things with

my high school friends because i know there's like our lives have gone in such completely different directions that it just feels weird to talk about like how well things have gone for me now um but i don't want to bring it up and it doesn't feel right to like if you know just i'd I'd rather not bring that up with them. This is very common, by the way. Yeah. I talk to tons and tons of my friends about, you know, hey, how many of your friends

at other points in your life, it doesn't have to just be, you know, middle school or high school, could be your college friends, could be maybe at a first job or whatever, but just like, how many of them do you still talk to just about anything? Usually what I find is the more successful that people are,

the lower the number ends up being. And I used to think like, man, Like that'd be horrible to like lose connection with these people. Like, did you get too good for them? Right. But then what you find if you really start to unpack and ask them is they're like, Hey, the things that I talk about with my current friends, I can't talk about with my old friends. They won't understand.

They don't get it. They, you know, all these different things. And so I have a friend who he's still very close with, uh, what I'll call his childhood friends, his group on an eight, 10 of them, whatever it is. And he's a very successful tech, uh, founder. he cannot talk about anything that he does on a day-to-day basis because they either one think that he's like bragging right or two they're like oh the rich guy like right like they're giving him shit but like there's an undertone of like hey you're different than us and now this guy

comes from a different country so like all of his friends are still back in his home country and so like there's even that whatever but i remember like really kind of unpacking it with him and He's like, dude, he, you know, he went and he met somebody who's like a well-known investor. And he's like, if I tell my friends that I did that, they will literally mock me either relentlessly or they will stop talking to me because they're going to think I'm an asshole. Yeah. And he's like, so I have to like have a new set of friends for this new point of my life that I can have these conversations with where like, they also went and met that person.

Right. Like, like, like it's not, they won't even think twice that I bring it up. Yeah. And instead we can strategize about like maybe what to say in the meeting or what the takeaways were completely different, you know, kind of receptivity to the same exact event, just based on where those people are in their life. And when you knew that it's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That, um, that, that fear of, you know, your friends, like, uh, thinking you're too good for them or something. I think that's, I think a lot of people think that what happens in these kind

of situations is, you know, a friend becomes very successful, a person becomes very successful and they, they think they're too good for the friends. And that's why they lose friends along the way. That's why, you know, as, as you climb up where do you have few and few of those, those friends from the old neighborhood often what happens is actually it's the people from the old neighborhood who sever ties with you because they feel jealous or they feel you know self conscious inadequate something like because we all came from the same place but now one of us is doing better and like it it's it it stings a little bit and you don't necessarily want to remain in contact with that person because it reminds you of that and i understand that but

yeah i've lost friends like i've i've gone out of my way to try to retain ties and some of these guys just don't want to you know they don't they don't talk and it's i don't think it's anything that i i did to them it's just they you know for for whatever reason they've decided to sever ties and i think it's related to that reason of like being reminded and so do you think they knew when you guys were all in high school like could you have picked who would be the like breakouts versus not so so the the friend that i i had just recently met with uh that i mentioned before so i i asked him i was like hey what was your gpa when you graduated high school he said it was 1.6 and uh and i said mine was 2.2 and so like 1.6 to 2. and i was like did i have the highest gpa

out of all those with 2.2 that's a c minus average and my friend had like a d or a d plus and i'm like sorry and i was like i don't you know some of these other friends i don't talk like what was their gpa but like probably not right because like if the if the the variance is 1.6 to 2.2 like i don't think you're gonna be oh 2.2 he's on his way to you know he's on his way to great things i don't think so um you know i looked at my old report card recently and somehow my high school offered a psychology class. I don't even remember taking it. I don't remember going, but I got a C minus in it. And I'm like, okay, so C minus in high school psychology that I don't remember going to. And now I have a PhD in psychology. And so I don't think that

anyone would have connected those dots. Maybe some of the more observant teachers or like my guidance counselor who kind of saw something in me maybe they would have but i think it yeah it would have you would have had to like spend a lot of time with us to really see it because we were all doing the exact same stupid things all the time why do you think you didn't do well in school i mean there were a lot of reasons uh you know i was living with so many different families all the foster homes uh like lack of supervision um in uh you know among among uh you know the adult figures in my life um you know maybe the kind of the kinds of friends i made the kinds of friends i was drawn to my um lack of belief in myself i didn't really think that i i was a smart person

or i or it was a some some some conflict of like i didn't want to believe i was smart but then if i was smart i didn't want to accept that because then i would have had to raise my sights for myself and i didn't want to do that um it was just easier for me to believe that i wasn't capable of it um yeah there was just a lot of like inner turmoil and conflict going on just from all of the you know all of the sort of chaos and and the trials of that period of of my early life um and then it wasn't until i was in a stable place in the military where like i had predictability i had structure i had uh mentors that i could count on and rely on and i had like a you know i made friends in the military too solid group of friends uh who would had um i mean that was the military

was like the first time that i met people who who like you know regularly referenced their mom and dad in the same sentence because they were married and like hey i'm gonna visit my mom and dad for christmas and i'm like your your mom and your dad in the same house like together like oh that's nice like i'd meet them i'd go to meet their families and i'm like this it started to help me to recognize like i could have a life like this if i wanted like you know i could um you know form a family that way like one of the things that i've always realized is um i would go to people's houses uh military wise or uh just through the years in school and stuff and i would be like this seems like too perfect like i don't know it was like this very weird thing where

there's one person in particular i want to say who they are but i was in middle school and i remember i went uh and i uh slept over at his house and we woke up in the morning and his mom was making crepes and i'd never heard of a fucking crepe in my life yeah and i remember being like did your mom do this like every morning and he was like well yeah like on the weekends and i remember being like you guys don't eat like pop tarts you know like like she literally was there like pouring it and like and i just remember thinking to myself like this is wild yeah and i don't know like for you you've had such like this like uh tumultuous childhood to then go into that environment did it seem almost like too good to be true or like fake or what uh yeah well now yeah

um i i try not to dwell on it actually um now like in the military it did seem like wow my life is so different now but i was kind of i was still relatively young and unsophisticated you know 18 19 20 i didn't have like a lot of deep thoughts about it but i did start to think like yeah maybe i could build a better life for myself maybe i could yeah it was sort of this aspirational and this feeling of like yeah these like my you know i i had a roommate uh in the military we got a house together off base once we'd reached a certain you know rank and met his family and his parents helped us move furniture into this house that we were renting and like just to see their interactions together and i remember like feeling this like it was like this uh feeling in

my chest of like this is so nice like i want this someday for like my family of like helping my son move into his first house or something um and um yeah but now now it's like i say you know i sort of like look at how my life is going and uh and think about where i came from and it's just it's it's almost too overwhelming uh and this is one of the reasons why i write is like that helps me to sort of process it um and sort of to like untangle this like ball of yarn and to like really sort of unpack what i really think about this and it helps me just sort of like uh uh mentally uh process it all um but yeah it's it's it's it's difficult so you have a book coming out in february yeah uh a memoir of foster care family and social class the book's called troubled um

Um, when you sit down to write something like this, how much of it is, uh, therapy, therapy and like therapeutic, kind of like what you're talking about now versus, uh, you have to work to remember things. Like you just sit down and you're just like, well, I remember, you know, day one, here we go. Or is it something where like, you really have to kind of work to kind of put together, um, a memoir like this? Uh, it is a lot of work.

Um, more than I expected. If I, if I had known in advance how hard it was going to be, I probably wouldn't have done it. Um, and so I'm glad I'm actually glad I didn't know because then it forced me to sit down and actually do the thing. Um, and, and I'm, I'm happy with how it turned out, but yeah, it was, uh, you know, it's so, so up until the point that I wrote that most of my writing was like sort of intellectual academic, you know, writing research papers, writing, you know phd stuff you know this um more sort of um uh from like a pop science pop psychology perspective a lot of my popular writing is that way but then to to write from an emotional perspective of my early life like it used like different areas of i mean literally uses different

areas of the brain it like draws on a different source of energy um and memory and all of those things and so it was way harder actually like writing my phd thesis was way easier actually then right like what i wrote the book first then i wrote the phd piece of the phd i mean it wasn't it wasn't easy but it was like i know what to do i can sit down here's you know here's the structure here's how it goes boom boom boom but with this book it's like here's a whole like bunch of things that happened to me how do i like shape it into something that makes coherent sense and to sort of like highlight certain things that i think are important certain themes like what lessons did i learn from all of this did anything important can i can i draw anything important out of this to

like help the reader to understand what occurred um and then yeah like sort of living in that that world you know talking to my sister talking to my old friends and trying to like rekindle all of those memories and i was so immersed in this is during the lockdown when i wrote it 2020 2021 that um yeah i was so immersed in it that you know like i would um i would like buy food that i would eat as a kid and try to smell it to like you know because memory and smell are actually that's the that's the sense that's most tightly linked to memory is is smell and so i would smell the food i would try to like i would listen to music from that era and so i'd be like asleep sometimes so immersed in it i would i would you know be bolt awake at 3 a.m a memory would occur to me in a

dream or just like somehow while i was uh in that unconscious state and i'd like run to my computer and like type it out before i forgot like man i haven't thought about that in years um and yeah it was just uh it was a very like difficult and draining experience and uh and i was actually like very it's funny so during the lockdown i would like take naps in the middle of the day and I thought it was because of like you know COVID lockdowns the world shut down I'm like you know it was like depressing right like it was I think everyone got like a little bit you know a lot of people got a little bit depressed during that period how fast things had changed and so I was taking these naps and I was like yeah it's just you know lockdown depression I guess and then

it wasn't until later that I realized like oh I wasn't depressed well I was depressed I was writing this book and thinking about all these things like that was so emotionally draining that I was taking naps, which I don't usually do, to sort of deal with it. And so, yeah, a lot of these things sort of express themselves physically in unexpected ways. Yeah, that's fascinating. What do you want people to take away from the book? When you write a memoir and you put everything you've put into this book in terms of some of these things are difficult for you to think about, you were depressed writing the book. This is not a book where you're writing about, look how amazing I am and my epic run to winning an Olympic gold medal. I knew from day one I was going to do that.

what do you hope people can learn from it yeah yeah i mean what yeah from from the process i mean i think you can you can sort of remember periods of your life where you demonstrated like unexpected strength and to recognize like the small acts of kindness that people did for you along the way i think like gratitude is not really like um uh uh popular or or promoted in our our culture and and when it is it's people think it's like trite or cliche oh like be thankful and people just dismiss it as like this kind of like oh okay fortune cookie wisdom or something it's like actually like there were despite the uh instability of my life like there were people along the way who uh expressed like unexpected kindnesses did nice things for me that they

didn't have to do went out of their way to like see that i could use help and like in the moment i didn't really understand just how um yeah just just how how how much how like how how powerful that act would be for me later or how much it actually helped me um just because i wasn't i wasn't that reflective back then and now to like recognize oh wow a lot of people did nice these nice things and to add it to think about it and then try to pay it forward as well you know like for me a lot of these people like i lost contact with them there's not a lot i can sort of like i just feel this um uh desire to reciprocate like to find these people say like hey remember that time you told me just like like a small comment that uh that meant a lot to me in the moment

i'll never be able to find that person again but then to just you know remember to say nice things to other people or highlight you know when someone does something meaningful or important or goes out of their way to do their best to to bring it up to them and and tell them uh that it's you appreciate it i think that can go a long way i asked polina what questions she wanted me to ask you and she said just ask him this one thing because i think it encapsulates so much of his life do you still feel like an outsider or do you now feel like you've kind of broken through and have somehow become an insider oh uh no i i think like weirdly um now i feel like an outsider even when i in the places where i used to be an insider meaning where i grew up interesting um now because

i'm in this environment now with like you know a bunch of people who graduated from college and work these kinds of uh jobs and and and uh live comfortable lives now when i go back home talk to my old friends or talk to talk to uh my members of my adoptive family um i feel like an outsider there too now um i talk to military friends you know all of it i mean it's i feel like an insider and an outsider at the same time. I still feel mostly like, uh, uh, an outsider. Yeah. Mostly like an outsider. I don't know if that ever changes. Yeah. Right. But, um, for those who are interested, the book troubled Rob Henderson, a memoir of foster care family and social class. It comes out in February. So I believe you can now go Amazon everywhere else

and pre-order it. Um, and then maybe we'll do this again before, uh, before the book actually comes out and kind of go through in detail, uh, some of the stories that you have in here, because, uh, I think it could, uh, benefit a lot of people. So I appreciate you taking the time to write the book, but also coming on here and talking and, uh, where can we send people to find you on the internet? Yeah. Yeah. You can follow me on Twitter at Rob K Henderson. You can follow my sub stack, Rob K Henderson dot sub stack.com. And, uh, yeah, I mean, if you sign up for my, my sub stack email list, I'll announce, uh, you know, all the details about the book. I'll probably share some early chapters and excerpts

and things like that if people are curious before they decide to pre-order. So robkhenderson.substack.com. That's right, yeah. Thank you so much for doing this. We'll do it again. Thanks, Anthony.