TRIGGERnometry - How Elites Hurt the Poor With Terrible Ideas - Rob Henderson

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

SPONSORED BY:  *Ridge Wallet* Use Code “TRIGGER ” for 10% off your order at https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER Rob Henderson is a PhD student at Cambridge University studying Social and Evolutionary Psychology. He coined the term 'luxury beliefs' and writes regularly on Substack (robkhenderson.substack.com). He is also a veteran. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The whole white privilege idea is itself a kind of luxury belief because, I mean, first, what's happening is that, like, the people who seem to be most strident and in favor of this white privilege idea are themselves white. And what they're doing is they're elevating their own status, right? Like, if a white person at, you know, some fancy college or whatever in sort of a position of prominence says, you know, oh, I decry white privilege, is that white person losing status or gaining status, right? Like, are they hurting themselves or are they actually elevating themselves even more among their peer group around the people? people whose opinions they care about. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson.

And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations, with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a man who coined the term luxury believes. He's a PhD student at Cambridge. Robert, Robert Henderson, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks, guys. Great to be here. It's great to have you on. Before we get into talking about luxury beliefs, I mean, it's a fascinating concept that you've described, and I really can't wait to talk about it.

But before we do, who are you, how are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Right. So my name is Rob Henderson. Like you said, I'm a PhD student at Cambridge in my final year, studying social and evolutionary psychology. Before this, I was studying at Yale, also studying psychology for my undergrad. I worked in the lab there as well in the psychology department.

And so this is just my sort of broad areas of interest, human nature, psychology, evolutionary theory, this kind of stuff. I mean, before this, I suppose part of what contributed to my coming up with this idea of luxury beliefs is my unusual path to higher education. So to back way up, I was born into poverty. I never knew my father. I grew up in Los Angeles. My mother when I was three became addicted to drugs. She wasn't able to care for me. And so I spent the next few years living in foster homes around Los Angeles. I lived in seven different homes. throughout my childhood, I was adopted by this working class family where we settled in Northern California. I was eight years old. And yeah, so we grew up in this kind of dusty town, very poor crime-ridden town. And yeah, I mean, there was still, even though I had been adopted, there were still

divorces and separations and more sort of turbulence. And, you know, all of this led me to really not care about school, about my studies. I got into a lot of trouble. and barely graduated high school, enlisted in the military when I was 17 right after I graduated and got out of there. And yeah, that sort of helped me to redirect my life in a better direction. And from there, I went to Yale on the GI Bill, which paid for tuition. And that's kind of where I ended up here today. And so I lived my life through a series of, you know, basically along the American status ladder, different social classes, starting off, you know, about as poor as you can be in a modern Western country and sort of grew up maybe more working class

after I'd been adopted. When I was in the military, I had a lot of friends who were maybe more sort of middle class or middle class. And then by the time I got to Yale, I had this extreme culture shock being around these students who were, you know, very affluent, upper middle or upper class, and of course at Cambridge as well. And so I suppose my unusual experience is sort of really informed my views about class and then later luxury beliefs. Wow, that is so fascinating, man. That is, you're a young guy, you've already had, you know, a couple of lifetimes worth of experiences, haven't you?

And I suppose you talk about how that shapes you. I think an outsider's perspective is always valuable, and you've had an outsider's perspective to many different worlds, as opposed, because of your background, right? Yeah, I guess, you know, it's funny. when I first got to Yale and started seeing just how different things really were, I'd never actually thought of my life as that unusual or strange. I mean, the reason is because it was all I ever knew. So my friends in high school had very similar lives to me.

You know, I had like five good friends in high school, my five close, you know, circle of friends. And they were also raised by, you know, like one of them, his mother was addicted to drugs. His father went to prison. He was raised by his grandmother. I had another friend who was raised by a single mom, another one who was raised by basically a single dad who had been married five times throughout our childhood, like married and divorced, just sort of revolving door of step-parents. So this was like what I knew. This was my life,

you know, up until age 17. And the military was a little different. You know, I met some friends who had maybe somewhat similar lives to me, some were better. But, you know, I just didn't really think of my life as that strange until I, you know, entered these sort of more, you know, unusual, fancy universities and meeting people who had never met anyone like me. And that, you know, That was like when I realized, like, oh, like the people who are responsible for shaping culture, responsible for shaping politics, the sort of future leaders of the world have no idea what's going on among sort of poor and working class people and what's going on with the families and with the kids and just the sort of level of disorder and instability.

And why do they not have an idea? Is it because they're so wealthy and privileged, they're divorced from it? Is it because they have a disinterest? What are the reasons? Yeah, I'm not... Okay, so why would... I mean, I think part of it is just living in a bubble, whether you live in a sort of suburb or a gated community

or a place where money can shield you from the day-to-day sort of, you know, what's happening with people who maybe aren't as fortunate as you. I mean, I saw a lot of this when I was at Yale, for example. So this university is located in New Haven, which is one of the poorest, you know, cities in the northeast, very rundown. I lived downtown in this area. My apartment was, you know, like two or three blocks from the campus, but on the way there

I had to walk through a lot of poverty, a lot of homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, and so on. And what I noticed is that the students very seldom left, like the bubble of this university, you know, like around the campus, there's a lot of security and police and, you know, gates where you have to, like, use your student card to access. And so it's, like, very simple. safe and secure. It's a fortress. Yeah, literally. That's how it is. It's fortress. And, you know, sometimes it was really funny to me. I would like, you know, go off campus and sometimes I'd advise

some of the other undergrads and we'd go like, you know, downtown to eat or something, go to a restaurant. And I could see like they suddenly became very wary like, like, because they're not used to it. You know, they're not used to being in like a city where it is. So with that sort of level of uncertainty. And, you know, is it their fault? I don't know. But, but yeah, there is this sort of distance. And I think a lot of their experience of, you know, poverty and, you know, what's going on is through, you know, it's sort of filtered through media, through the sort of content they choose to consume, which is often, you know, sort of tailored to flatter their own viewpoints, rather than actually seeing it up close and seeing what's really going on. So, yeah,

I think those are just, yeah, a few of the reasons. Okay. And what are these luxury beliefs that these students had? Yeah, so luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. There are a few different pieces to this for how I came up with this. I mean, one, I've sort of been discussing just my sort of first-hand experiences. But at the same time, I'd also been reading a lot of like sort of old school sociology from Thorstein-Baublin and Pierre Bordeaux. And, you know, basically they said that the way that people used to demonstrate their social class was through material goods, through sort of expensive items, luxury goods. And so, you know, for example, if you walked through the streets

of New York or London, too, you know, 100 years ago, you could tell immediately just by how people were dressed, how much money they had. You know, this person is wealthy, this person and maybe not so wealthy. Today, it's not necessarily the case. You don't really, it's a much noisier signal what someone is wearing and how it correlates to how much money they have in the bank. And so this was puzzling to me because I also saw a lot of this too, where students would sort of downplay their wealth or even lie about how rich their parents were. And so what's going on here? But then at the same time, I was also reading sort of more modern social psychology papers

within the last just a couple of years. And what social psychology research indicates is that the people who care the most about wealth and status are the people who already have it. So if you basically take these measures of, you know, you ask people, you know, basically your socioeconomic status, your level of income, your sort of position in society, how well you're doing it, your job, occupational success, and so on. And then you ask people questions like, you know, how much would it interest you to hold a position of power? How important is it for you to have influence over other people, sort of measurements of your interest and status? And wealth and so on. Those two things are

positively correlated, meaning sort of the higher up in society you are, the more you care about those things. And so this was puzzling to me because I saw, okay, so people, these, you know, sort of affluent upper middle class and upper class people really care about status based on this research, but they're not doing it through their material goods, you know, the way that they dress, they sort of downplay it, they sort of dress down in a way. So what's going on here? And then I realized, oh, it's luxury beliefs. It's the unusual and novel viewpoints that they're expressing to sort of distinguish themselves. You know, they crave distinction. That's the key goal here. Distinguish themselves from the sort of middle class.

or working class people who, you know, if someone in society holds a conventional opinion, a very easy way to show that you're not a member of the sort of the riffraff or the masses or something is to hold the opposite opinion or hold a strange opinion that maybe doesn't make sense because it shows. Like you, you're not one of them. And then the way that you, it's not just the opinion itself, but it's the way that you express it. If you express it in, you know, using vocabulary no one has ever heard of, for example. And I can tell a couple of stories about that too, you know, sort of my, the culture shock that I had, learning this, you know, strange words and lexicon.

Tell us some of those. Well, okay, so, so one example. My first year, I, I tried to join this, like, humor writing magazine on campus. This is a student-run thing. And we were brainstorming ideas for headlines for that month. So the month's theme for that magazine issue was puberty. And so we were just spitballing ideas, putting them up on the whiteboard. And I think I'd been in, yeah, it's been like four months, you know, since I'd entered the university and still pretty new to me.

And I came up with this headline of something like area male discovers porn gold mine in his front right pocket. And then the student editor looks at me and he raises an eyebrow. And he's like, why does it have to be gendered? And I look at him like, what? Like, what's gendered? I never heard that. I knew what gender was, you know, male, female, whatever, but gendered, ED, like, why would you make it into an adjective? And I just sort of, you know, like, okay, slunk back, like, okay, what was he talking about here?

But, yeah, there were other cases, you know, eventually I grew to learn, like, all kinds of terms that I had never heard before. You know, heteronormative, cisgender, cultural appropriation was another one that I learned. Well, were you not talking about that when you were growing up poor. You weren't talking about heteronormitivity. I'd never heard that. You know, and what's funny is that for a period of my youth, from, you know, basically, like, through my high school years, my, like, middle school high school years,

my adoptive mother entered a relationship with a woman, and they raised me together for, like, a few years. And so they were gay. I mean, but they were, they were, like, working-class Democrats. Right. You know, my mother and her partner. And so, you know, I had, like, familiarity with like gay culture and stuff just through living you know living with them but I'd never

heard any of these terms before and you know even now sometimes I'll go visit my mom and ask her some questions and stuff and she's like what are you know what are they talking about at that school of years like what's going on over there um it's almost like you can be gay without having the language well like a lot of it is like it's it's based on on class right like it's sort of if you you know straight people at these schools learn this vocabulary right like it's it's it's more a matter of who you're around, what kind of culture you're exposed to the amount of money people have around you, whether you have time to consume, like, whether you have the time to, like, sit around all day and, like, scroll Twitter, social media, keep up with the latest fashionable

trends, reading op-eds and whatever the latest news. Right now there's this whole thing about like the current thing, right? Like, can you keep up with the current thing? Well, if you work a blue-collar job and you can't look at your phone all day because you're, I don't know, you're, bus driver, I don't know, whatever it is. Like, you can't, like, you know, oh, let me check my phone every hour and see what's, you know, what's trending. And so that was something new, too. Like, I would have these in encounters with students where they would say, you know, oh, did you read this by so-and-so, some op-ed or something of the Atlantic or something? And I would say, no. Like, what are you reading the news for? Like, what's, like, why do you care?

You know, you're 19? Why do you care what's going on? Like, shouldn't you be, like, having fun and whatever. And then I grew to realize like, oh, part of, part of enculturation, you know, sort of assimilation into this upper class is sort of being very aware, like what's going on politically, what's going on the news, what are the, and so, you know, listening to the right podcast, reading the right periodicals, the right TV shows and movies, what's sort of hot right now in terms of the sort of latest luxury belief trend? And so that was new to me. You know, I grew up, We had never really consumed that much political content. I mean, we couldn't afford cable, so we didn't have like MSNBC or Fox News or any of this.

We subscribed to the local paper, you know, like Red Bluff Daily News. But then I get to, you know, to Yale. And it was like reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. They have stacks of this. They're trying to give these papers away to these students. They offer these steep discounts because they want to hook the students in and become lifetime subscribers. And so you can constantly keep up with what's going on. And this is an indicator of your class, right?

like, do you know what's going on? Can you sort of describe events that are happening far removed from you? Do you have the time, the ability to consume all of it? It's sort of an indicator of your, you know, the comforts of your everyday life. Are you tired of using bulky old wallets, giving you a bulge where you don't want it to be? My old wallet was massive. So it brought all the ladies to the yard, which was a huge distraction and got in the way of my esteemed work on trigonometry. Ridge wallets have an incredible solution for you.

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Ridge are so confident in the quality of their product, they will give you 45 days to test drive their wallets. That means you can get the wallet, use it, and if you don't like it, you can return it within 45 days. Because Ridge are such great guys, they're going to give you 10% off and free worldwide shipping and returns. To take advantage of this incredible offer, go to ridge.com forward slash trigger. That's ridge.com forward slash trigger and use our special code, which is, of course, Trigger. Back in the day, so So Vablin, he was a sociologist and economist. He wrote The Theory of the Leisure class in 1890. And he wrote about how, you know, like even things like soft hands, you know, these are

indicators of sort of your social rank in society because, you know, you all equally don't do manual labor? Art, like do you wear sort of delicate and restrictive clothing, tuxedoes, evening gowns, do you go golfing and beagling? you sort of partake in these activities that require a lot of investment of time to learn how to do. Like, you know, mastering golf takes a lot of time and wearing certain kinds of clothes and so on. And today it's sort of shifted away from expensive and time-consuming hobbies or expensive clothes and towards sort of your luxury beliefs.

And I can give you like specific examples of the beliefs that I was seeing too. Okay. Well, I was going to say, I suppose the difference would be that in the past, with a luxury set of behaviors, you were the one paying the price. If you went out and you golfed for, or you had to be able to afford that. If you went out and you bought a tuxedo and walked around it, you had to be able to afford it. You had to be invited to places where tuxedos were welcome. You paid the price. You paid the price. But with luxury beliefs, it ain't you paying the price, is it? Yeah, well, okay, so you often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but my claim is that, you know, in the articles I've written about this, is that even if you do, you know, pay a price for it, it's still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. So give us the examples now, and let's talk about them. Okay, so, for example, so I had this conversation recently with, this is a couple years ago now, with a former classmate of mine. You know, she went to Yale. She works at sort of a well-known technology company. She's doing very well for herself. But she was telling me that she thinks that monogamy is outdated and that marriage is this kind of like patriarchal, oppressive institution. Oh, men's sister. And so I'm listening to her. I'm like, okay. And then I asked her, well, how did you?

grow up? Like, how were you raised? And she said, well, it was raised by my mom and dad and a kind of conventional, typical, you know, intact family. And then I asked, okay, so then are you going to do something different? Or are you going to do, like, what do you plan to do with your family later on, you know? And she said, I'll probably do the same thing. I'll probably get married and I'll get a husband and have kids like that. And I said, but then why are you talking about marriage being outdated? You know, it just didn't make sense to me. Like, why are you saying one thing, but then you're going to do this other set of behaviors. And she said, well, I'm just like, she said, like, well, just because my preference doesn't mean

has to be for everyone, you know, like, I think society can evolve beyond, you know, this, this norm having to be, you know, sort of implemented and, and sort of promoted in society, you know, just because I want to do it is just my preference. But, you know, I think we can evolve beyond it. And I'm thinking to myself, like, so you were raised by this intact family. You did very well in your life. You're going to have probably an intact family. and your kids are going to inherit a lot of the benefits of like that kind of lifestyle.

But you're promoting this other view. You know, she's sort of amplifying this opposing view of, you know, we need to get past monogamy, we need to get past marriage and so on. And this is a luxury belief, this belief that family doesn't matter, or we should evolve beyond monogamy, or that like sort of the stability that that cultivates is unimportant. And this, this is like, you know, probably my original observation. of a luxury belief. I remember distinctly when I was in this classroom at Yale, and there was a seminar of about 20-something students. And the professor administered this anonymous poll to the class.

And the question was basically, you know, were you raised by both of your birth parents? And, you know, none of, like I wasn't talked about that, but none of my friends were either like that. The group of six of us, none of us were raised by both of our birth parents. this professor administered this poll, and I wasn't sure what to expect, but when the results came in, and she put it up on her slides, and it was out of 27 students. Only two said no. It was just me and one other student. I didn't know who it was in the class. And the rest, you know, more than 90%. And I was like, what? Like, what's going on here? And so this was shocking to me because I'd already known that a lot of these people came from like, well-to-do families. They had a lot of money, but I didn't realize

just how different their lives were in terms of their family structure. And to me, that's not a coincidence that the kinds of people who tend to get into these kinds of universities are raised in sort of stable, you know, married parents in this sort of monogamous relationship, outdated, oppressive, but, you know, somehow they got into this. And so if you look at the data, for example, of sort of what's going on with working class and poor families, so in 1960, regardless of social class in the U.S., 95% of children are raised by both of the their birth parents. Whether you were rich, whether you were poor, this was just the sort of cultural norm. It was the expectation. And then if you fast forward to 2005, the upper class, you know,

sort of educated, affluent people, it dropped slightly to 85%. So it was 95% 1960, and then dropped to 85% in 2005. Whereas if you look at working class and poor people, it was 95% in 1960, and by 2005, it had plummeted to 30%. 30%. Yeah, 30%. Meaning it's, you're an anomaly now. If you're, you're an anomaly now if you grow up in a low-income community and you're raised by both of your parents. To me, even that number seemed high because I didn't really know, I knew, I knew, I think one kid

who was sort of like in my sort of social circle or whatever, who had that. But, you know, that was like very unusual. So even 30% seemed a little high to me. And so it's really just night and day. You know, if you walk around a sort of upper middle class neighborhood, like, you know, see a lot of married parents.

But then if you ask a lot of those people, what do you think about marriage, monogamy, norms, so on all to them will sort of express this view like, ah, it doesn't have to be for everyone or like all, you know, whatever works, you know, families are kind of all the same. And, you know, what we do doesn't necessarily have to be for everyone, that kind of thing. And that belief, like, you know, much of it originated in the early 1960s and later the sort of cultural and sexual revolution during that time.

A lot of it from college campuses, highly educated people were promoting this view that, you know, marriage is oppressive and all of this kind of stuff. And the belief trickled and was amplified throughout society through the media, through pop culture, through movies, and so on. And the norm eroded. And the people who promoted the view that the norm should be eroded continue to get married at very high rates and sort of adhere to this set of practices and beliefs that benefited themselves on their own children while inflicting costs on the lower class. I'll give you a modern kind of version of this. I talked to a friend of mine who, you know, he was telling me, you know, when I set my Tinder radius to one mile just outside of the, you know,

basically just around the university, and I see the bios of, you know, the women that he's, you know, swiping on or whatever, he says that, like a lot of their profiles, you know, they say things like, like, Polly or, you know, keeping it casual, basically saying, like, you know, they're not interested in anything too serious. He says like something like half of them have like something like that in their bio. And then he said, but when I expand the radius on my Tinder to like five miles to include sort of the rest of the city and its outskirts, a sort of more run down area beyond the university bubble, he says like half the women are single moms. And basically the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsized effect on the people who are less fortunate who don't have high levels of education.

economic capital who can, you know, basically the people who can afford that belief, you know, because even if you're, even if you are a single mother, but you're doing very well for yourself economically, you can sort of make that work for you. But if you're very low income, very poor, and you're a single mother, you have a completely different experience, right? And so maybe it is the case to some degree that if you're very affluent, you can sort of choose your family and in all likelihood your kid will be okay. But if you're very poor, it's a completely, different experience, right? And so this was sort of the original view that I found for luxury beliefs, a sort of prime example of it. Do you think these people are utopians, Rob? They've got this

idea of, you know, we're all going to get to this incredible, magical place with these beliefs. But real life doesn't work like that. Yeah, I mean, I think much of it is sincere. I don't, you know, I think like a lot of it is. Like, if you sort of let people live their lives and you don't have to have cultural guardrails or sort of norms that kind of serve as safety nets for people that, you know, they'll be okay. And I think there is maybe a utopian undercurrent to it. But to me, it more reflects a sort of abdication of responsibility. You know, if you are fortunate enough to, you know, have some influence and some wealth and some kind of status in society, you know, society, you know, like you, I think you have some duty to think, like, well, what are, like, good norms?

Like, what's a good way to live your life? And to promote those norms, you know, like, I noticed that a lot of sort of affluent people, they're very, they're sort of okay with, with promoting things like, like financial assistance, for example, you know, whether it's the welfare state or what have you, sort of state benefits for people. And, you know, I'm not opposed to that. Fine. Like, if people need financial assistance, that's fine. But at the same time, like, money is not the only thing that can give rise to a good life, right? Like, you can't just give everyone, you know, UBI or something and then expect them to live happily ever after. Like, also what contributes to a happy life is sort of living by a set of norms and behaviors and so forth.

And also to, like, you know, a lot of this is also for kids, right? Like, kids don't get a choice for how they live their life, right? like most kids would rather live in a sort of stable, secure, safe family environment. And so, yeah, and so a lot of these luxury beliefs, not only do they affect sort of adults who are sort of poor and working class, but the kids are the ones who actually suffer. Well, they heard the kids the most. And this is kind of, I mean, we're joking around as we want to do and you're a very sort of cheerful academic guy and you talk about, but this is fucking awful. Yeah. This is awful. You've got rich and privileged and wealthy people

essentially destroying the very things that poor people need to make their lives better in order to make the rich and wealthy people and powerful people feel higher status at their dinner party. It's fucking awful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it is. So if you express these views, you will often sort of elevate your status

among your similarly educated and affluent peers who will say like, yeah, yeah, of course, monogamy is outdated, this is great. and you sort of give yourself a little status boost. But as that belief sort of percolates throughout society, it does have detrimental consequences. I mean, going back to that idea about like, you know, financial assistance and living a good life and so on, I mean, there's some interesting research in, I think these were done by economists who basically sort of calculated the monetary value of sort of certain aspects of sort of social life, for example. So they calculated that being married has the same effect on happiness as earning an extra $100,000 a year. And so one sort of simple, this is a simplified interpretation of this is, well, if you want to make people happier, you can give them $100,000 a year, or you can promote marriage, right?

Like if both of us have the same effect on happiness, like what is the sort of metric of interest here, is it sort of making people have a lot of money or is it making people happier, right? Like, I think happiness is probably more life satisfaction or well-being. And there's other sort of aspects to this, too. Like having a friend that you see on a regular basis was worth, I think, $90,000 a year. Talking to your neighbors regularly was worth $40,000 a year. So basically cultivating social cohesion and marriage and friendship and all this stuff. Like having an active and good social life seems to have, like, this sort of outside. So if you do all of those things, I mean, even things like religion, I mean, I'm not a particularly religious person,

but the benefits of religion are pretty clear that, for example, if you go to a religious service once a week, it has the same effect on happiness as moving from the bottom income quintile to the top income quintile. And so basically if you're a relatively low-income person, but you're married and you have a friend and you talk to your neighbors and you go to a religious service, your level of happiness is the same, basically, as like a very sort of wealthy person. But we spend a lot of time talking about sort of wealth inequality and so on, which I think that is an important topic. But often these other sort of the sort of norms that give rise to happiness are often overlooked. Rob, when this, I started to become aware of these subjects, the luxury beliefs, as you said, someone put forward this argument about privilege. And it always stuck with me, actually, which was one of the things about having privilege

is that you're not aware that you have privilege. And to a certain extent, I'm sympathetic to that idea. Don't you think that we can also use our argument with these people who put forward these luxury beliefs? If you've always grown up wealthy, if you've always grown up instability, you don't realize in many ways how lucky you are because you've never seen the flip side of it.

So you're putting forward these arguments and it's coming from ignorance, really, because you've got no idea of the ramifications. that these things are going to have further down the line. That's a good point. You know, one of the, one of the things I've been thinking about is how, I mean, so a lot of, a lot of affluent people, I think, have, like, at least attempted to imagine what it's like to be poor.

Maybe through, you know, watching movies or TV shows or something, like, you see, like, oh, like, this might be, like, you know, because I think that's, like, a lot of, a lot of, like, you know, sort of where people get their, their views from, right? It's sort of entertainment and pop culture. And so they at least attempt to put themselves in that position of what would it be like to have no money. I don't think I've ever met a sort of upper middle class or affluent person who has ever tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up without their family, you know, without their parents, without sort of that kind of stability of reliable caretakers. And to me this is important because if you look at, so for example, so developmental and developmental and evolutionary psychologists make this distinction between childhood harshness and childhood instability.

And harshness is basically low-income, low socioeconomic status in your family. And childhood instability includes things like a number of relocations in your childhood, whether there was a father present in the home, whether the parents were divorced, how many different romantic partners the child's parents had when they were growing up and so on, just sort of the day-to-day disorder that they experienced. And literally every single paper I've looked at investigating these two things. It finds that childhood instability is a much stronger predictor of harmful and risky behaviors in adulthood compared to childhood poverty or low income.

So there was a pretty widely cited 2012 study showing that childhood instability was a significant predictor of, you know, in adulthood. So sort of the number of short-term sexual partners, team pregnancy rates. rates of addiction, likelihood of committing a crime, and so on, whereas childhood socioeconomic status was not associated with any of those outcomes in adulthood. And there was another study in 2016 which found that regardless of family income, adolescents who were raised in instability were more likely to be committed to drugs. And this was across socioeconomic lines. So basically a rich teenager who grows up in instability is more likely to be committed to drugs

than a poor teenager raised in a stable home. And so basically, like, this sort of day-to-day disorder and instability has a much stronger effect. I mean, there's even some interesting research on personality and it sort of links with instability. So there's this idea in psychology called the Dark Triad personality traits. So narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism. And, you know, this is like associated with cynicism, hostility, disregard for other people. And again, so childhood instability was significantly associated with these dark triath traits in adulthood, whereas childhood poverty was not associated with any of them.

And if anything, I've actually seen kind of the reverse. There's this interesting finding that low childhood socioeconomic status was associated with slightly higher scores on empathy in adulthood. So people who grew up poorer seem to actually have slightly higher levels of empathy than people who grew up rich, whereas childhood instability had a completely opposite effect. Like if you grew up in instability, your ability to feel empathy for other people is very much declined, diminished in adulthood. Which might explain why there's more violent crime, particularly, in some of those errors, potentially. You know, we had Dr. Dana Fleischman, one of our favorite

guests on the show. And in the first interview, do you remember we talked about, in that particular context, we talked about why women were more attracted, some women were more attracted to people with the dark trad characteristics. And she talked about how if you grow up in an unsublished stable environment and you see people cheating each other, screwing each other, roe over, lying to each other and whatever, you sort of learn that to survive in that environment, you have to be like that. So that makes perfect sense. But, you know, particularly the, the family, the lack of family intactness issue. Why is, do you think part of the reason that the luxury beliefs around that have shifted over time is that

and maybe I'm curious to know why you think it's happened is we've got to a point where I think people in sort of the chattering classes as we call them in the UK it's become sort of like oh you can't tell other people how to live their lives like it's much better to just give them money and benefits than it is to like go

maybe we should all do this or we should where's that like and I feel uncomfortable I feel uncomfortable sitting there going maybe people should get married before there you know, like, I'm some sort of like conservative from the 1980s. I'm going to start shutting down comedians and whatever. Like, that's not who I am.

And I feel that. So where's that coming from? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I mean, I feel it too. You know, whenever I talk about this stuff, especially early on when I first started publicly expressing these views. Like, yeah, there was something. And I think it's just, you know, for better or worse, people desire. Like, they don't want to be ostracized. They don't want to be vilified.

or ridiculed for their views. And I think like this is actually part of, part of, like, this is how sort of norms rise and fall is not just through sort of people who are unwilling to impose them, but also another norm arises in itself that you will be punished for trying to promote it, right? And so this is sort of what happens where like initially it was just uncool to talk about marriage and stuff. And then pretty soon, like if you talked about it, other, the norm became like, how dare you say that, you know, and this actually sort of further accelerates the erosion of that norm.

And so, so, yeah, a lot of the behaviors that are, you know, on average, pretty beneficial, not just for the people, but for kids and so on, one contributor was this view that, like, oh, like, now no one wants to speak out about it. No one wants to express the view. And this is, you know, why a lot of people are sort of pushing back now. And I think saying that, like, it is important to express your viewpoints and so on. So, yeah, I think that is, you know, people who believe in these things, they need to get over it and start talking more about it. You know, one concept that always boils my urine, to put it mildly, is when I see wealthy, middle-class white people talking about white privilege.

And I'm like, you have never stepped foot outside of the city of London. If you do, it's because you're going on holiday to a very nice part of Europe or to your summer residence. You've never been to a part of the UK like Cornwall. where people grow up in poverty, where towns are depressed, there are no jobs. So it's just generation after generation of unemployment, or in the Northeast, for example. And the fact that they just sit there and spout this just makes me so angry. Yeah. Yeah, it really is a kind of like a narrow-minded, blinkered view of, yeah,

I guess just race and culture and society is just because what they're really saying is, like the only white people I interact with are the rich ones, you know, and a lot of those people themselves who are expressing this view are themselves like rich and white, you know. I mean, what's interesting is that a lot of the sort of non-white people they interact with are also sort of much better off than their, you know, counterparts in, you know, more deprived areas. And so, you know, the whole white privilege idea is itself a kind of luxury belief because, I mean, first, what's happening is that like the people who seem to be most strident and in favor of this white privilege idea are themselves white.

and what they're doing is they're elevating their own status, right? Like if a white person at, you know, some fancy college or whatever in sort of a position of prominence says, you know, oh, I decry white privilege, is that white person losing status or gaining status, right? Like, are they hurting themselves or are they actually elevating themselves even more among their peer group around the people whose opinions they care about? And by the way, are they getting more privileges as a result? Right.

Because if you're a white person who's in the creative industries, as we want, were before we self-canceled, right? Then the more you talk about the stuff, the more opportunities you get. The more money you get paid, right? So you are actually entrenching your privilege by advancing this concept. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you get invitations and you, at the very least, you're not inhibiting your own opportunities. Because if you deny white privilege, you may actually hurt yourself to some degree. So by espousing it, you're actually sort of maintaining and elevating it. And, And, you know, this whole concept of white privilege was mystifying to me when I first encountered it because, yeah, like where I grew up in, you know, Northern California. So when I was growing at the foster homes, probably most of my foster siblings were, you know, they were like Hispanic, black and a couple white kids here and there.

But in Red Bluff, it was like much more sort of working class white and Hispanic. And, you know, my best friend, some of them were like basically poor white kids, you know, like raised by, you know, single moms or alcoholic stepdad's or whatever. and I'm like, okay, well, whatever, like, that wasn't privilege for them, you know, like, what is, like, this whole white privilege idea. It really just seems to be wealth privilege, and people are just trying to, like, use this concept to, I guess, sound sophisticated or to elevate themselves or to undermine competitors. The whole, the whole concept of it is just, yeah, it's very silly. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website?

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Do you think part of this what we're talking about here? And I think maybe it's less applicable for America than it is for the UK, but it's rooted in classism. You've got the upper classes who go, where the thinkers, where the intelligent ones, where the Harvard, Yale educated people. Correct. Yeah.

We know what's good for you, the working classes. So we'll do the thinking, and we've got these ideas. Do you think part of it is that or is that my chip on my shoulder? I think there's some truth to that. I mean, yeah, there is this sort of overconfidence, this arrogance that is that is sort of pervasive among highly educated and affluent people who think that they know better, who have more time to spend on utopian ideas. And I mean, like, I've never met someone who had like this whole sort of like political theory before about how society should be run until I sort of joined this news. social environment and these new class and interacting with different kinds of people. And that's just like not something, first you don't have time, but then you just, I think there's also this craving for like power to exercise over people. The vast majority of people just want to be left alone. They just want to sort of live their lives, go to work, you know, spend time with their

loved ones and so on. But a lot of elite institutions attract the kind of personality who is interested in power. I mean, I mentioned that study before. People who were interested in wealth and status are already have it and they're interested in getting more of it. And so they sort of collect the credentials and inhabit elite institutions and so forth. And part of the reason for that is because they have an idea in mind about how things should be. And they're very interested in attempting to enact their favorite policies and so on. And so I think there is some truth to that. And then again, I think a lot of this isn't necessarily due to malice. You know, there's not. But their hearts are, you know, many of them are in the right place. But. But, but they, they, their hearts are, you know, many of them are in the right

place, but they just don't, they're not thinking of the sort of downstream second order effects of their views that may be sound good, that maybe get accolades from their peers, but then when the rest of society adopts it, they don't think through, okay, well, what would happen if this view were to become popular? Right. This has always been my frustration because I've always been, you know, I think I'm probably one of those people in the sense that I'm interested in thinking about how society ought to be structured, how do we solve this problem?

how do we solve that problem? I've always been since I was a kid. But what bothers me about a lot of this discourse is, I think we're not really asking how do we solve this problem. We're asking what makes me feel good and look good if I express about this problem. I just don't see that as a practical answer. And that's always been like the thing I couldn't get my head around. It's like these people claim to be wanting to solve the problem.

But the moment anyone actually mentions the actual solutions, everyone has a meltdown and freaks out and says, well, you can't say that and we mustn't talk about this. So there's a kind of impracticality to it. And what worries me based on what you're describing is, of course, our media class, our political class, our educational system, all of those institutions are largely staffed and populated and run by the very people you're talking about. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's, to some degree, it is concerning that people who, you know, there's, you know, there's there's a sort of a competing competing motives I suppose you know on the one hand people do care about what's going on in society and how to improve lives for other people I mean very few people are like how do I make things worse you know they want to make things better but then there's this other motive of sort of obtaining validation from your peers of doing well in your career

and in many of these institutions your career hinges on the opinions of other people And so oftentimes this sort of self-interest wins out, right? Or you're able to do the intellectual acrobatics necessary to convince yourself that this sort of silly-sounding idea, this luxury belief will somehow make things better. You can sort of talk yourself into it. And, you know, coincidentally enough, it just happens to align with your self-interest and will advance your career when you was spoused at the same time. And I think a lot of people don't take the time to step back and think, like, okay, am I expressing this view because I really believe it? Am I expressing it because it benefits me? Am I expressing it because other people around me seem to like it?

And it's helping my career. I mean, what is really going on here? What would really help other people? And I think more people should maybe step back and reflect. Rob, I'm going to ask a question now, which is a question I ask myself. And it's starting to happen every day. Look at the way we're dressed. Look at who we are.

Are we, am I conservative? Is that what's happening here? I'm dressed like a conservative. Yeah. I get an email every day from someone goes, T-shirt and blazer, dress up a bit, what's wrong with you? There's a guy in India

messages me once a month, just to say that. He says in India, only criminals dress like this. Correct, mate. All right. Hold on my wallet. But do you see what I mean? Are we just conservative? Are we just becoming those middle-aged guys

who are railing against young people? mate, I'm still young. What is this? Why are you trying to destroy me? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, maybe. You know, it's funny. People, okay, so I mean, of course, in like the sort of political science, political

psychology research, a lot of it does seem to indicate that as you grow older, people do tend to become, you know, somewhat more conservative in their attitudes. I mean, the other thing is, like, maybe societal trends have gone so far in a direction that we didn't anticipate that, you know, I mean, what is, this whole term conservative, I mean, there's so many, you know, contentious debates about what it even means. But I mean, if you, if you study, you know, history and cultural anthropology and sort of how have people lived their lives, I mean, marriage as an institution arose independently in multiple different places across multiple different cultures in different times and so forth. And to me,

I don't know if it's conservative or not, but there is something worthy of our attention that if all of these different cultures came up with the same idea independently and it seemed maybe to have solved some kind of societal problem for them, that maybe we should think very carefully before we start to dismantle it and erode it and so on. And so, I mean, there are other examples of this. But yeah, if something has endured and stood the test of time,

then maybe it arose for reason and not just out of, you know, ignorance or just from being sort of backwards or something. And I'm just, you know, oftentimes very skeptical that, you know, we're the ones who have it all figured out. And, you know, every other culture throughout history, across time, around the globe, like, they're the ones who are wrong. And I'm, you know, we're the ones you get it right. It just seems very unlikely. But here's the thing with your question as well, Francis. I've been thinking about this a lot. Like, the idea that one side of the political debate is right and the other one is wrong. It's the most moronic thing I've ever heard, right? Because the, the, the,

discussion between more change or less change, which is essentially the debate, right? Conservatives want things to stay more the same and progressive people tend to want things to change faster. That's always existed in society. And there would have been times in society in the history of different societies where you absolutely needed to be progressive. You needed to change things because the status quo was awful, right? And there's times when actually you got to a place where things were pretty good and you'd want to keep them stable, right?

So the idea that you in your own life over a period of 80 years are going to be like have one position and that position is going to be the right one. You might get lucky in that you live in a society where like, you know, everything's great for 80 years and you don't ever need to change anything. But that's unlikely, right? So that's why I always refuse to commit myself to either of these tribes because I'm like, well, on some things at some points in time in some geographical locations, being progressive is brilliant. Like in Russia, where I come from, I'm a progressive, right? In the UK, people think I'm on the right, right? I'm actually neither. I'm just going like, this society is pretty good.

Let's kind of like maybe not destroy it. Whereas that society, it's got some good things about it, but it does need a lot of, you know, change to move into the 21st century, please, at some point. You know what I mean? And that, to me, is really like the sensible way to look at politics because what is appropriate today in the UK, may be completely inappropriate to what was happening

somewhere in Sri Lanka 20 years ago. Do you know what I mean? I do. So we are conservative. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, like you're saying, these terms are flexible. They're fluid depending on where you are.

Depending on the point in history where you are. I mean, even, you know, I mean, if you existed 20 years ago, you would probably be on the left, right? But things are changing. I was on the left. I mean, yeah. So, I mean, I was, yeah, I was probably more on the left, you know, 10 or 15 years ago or whatever, too.

And things change. I mean, people individually change, but then the culture changes around them too. And like you said, even by country, you know, in one country or this and another country or that. And so the labels don't always map on to anything stable or concrete. And so, yeah, I mean, I think often these are just like convenient ways to divide people and to get them to, you know, bicker and go back and forth and for, you know, people to make money off of this. Rob, we've got to wrap up in a bit, but one thing that I wanted to ask you at the beginning, but I wanted to talk about your academic work. But if you forgive me for saying this, you're a remarkable guy.

The life you've just, you've had already is incredible. Like, growing up the way you did with all of that instability, and you talk about statistically speaking, that can cause a lot of difficulties. And yet you sit here as a PhD student in your last year at Cambridge. You've been at Yale. You've been in the middle. Like, you've had an extraordinary life. What are some of the qualities or some of the approaches or some of the ways of thinking

that you think are important for people who face some of the challenges that you faced as a kid? I mean, you know, so this is a question I get. And it's always, like, I'm always, I guess, reluctant to give an answer because there's no, like, one-size-fits-all. This is what works for every kid. I mean, for me, it was really like, you know, I joined the military right out of high school. And that was, you know, the military is like the most sort of intense, coercive environment you can be in where every aspect of your life is tightly controlled. And that was

exactly what I needed. But that's not what most people need or many people need, right? Like, I wouldn't necessarily recommend going through that path that I went through. But it was what I needed at that time. Given the sort of level of chaos and instability in my early life, I needed basically the opposite of that in the military where like, you know, here's step by step, here's what you're supposed to do. Like, you know, your uniform, the way you make your bed. Like all of this stuff was just so tightly controlled. Was that a difficult adjustment for you? It was very difficult. I mean, I thought it was ridiculous, but at the same time, like, there was something attractive about it because, like, my supervisors and mentors and commanding officers and so forth, like, these were, you know, like,

male figures, like, father figures or whatever, like, these were guys that I respected. You know, oftentimes it was begrudging respect, but I understood, like, you know, this is the first time that I've met, like, you know, an adult male who I would want to emulate or that I admire in some way or something. So, you know, and then part of it was like, I knew that they had to do all of this stuff that I'm doing to. And they would tell us, like, you know, we had to do that too. Like, you know, so shut up and do it. And so, like, that also sort of added to my respect that, like, they sort of walked the walk kind of thing. But, but yeah, like, and it took a lot of work, too. I mean, I was in. I, you know, it was just, it was a long process of sort of self-development, self-improvement and so on to get, you know, to sort of, like, leave behind the sort of mindset and the bad habits and everything that I had picked up. throughout my childhood and adolescence. But, I mean, for a lot of kids, I mean, I think just finding that stability in any form, whether it's through sports or finding a mentor, finding someone who takes like an interest, has a stake in your future,

who cares about you. Yeah, that would go a long way, I think, to helping a lot of kids. I found your answer really illuminating because the one thing you pointed out was this is the first time I met male role models that I wanted to emulate. That is so powerful, Rob. Because when I taught in underprivileged schools and really poor areas of London, the kids who are all struggling, I'd be able to go, father ain't at home, dad isn't around, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I mean, it's fatherlessness is a huge problem that very few people are talking about. I mean, of course, I saw it, but then, you know, I volunteered as a tutor or two for underprivileged kids.

And it's the same story. Very few of them have fathers at home. And it's, yeah, this is a huge problem. having role models, I think, for young males, you know, that absence, that sort of lack, even if young boys or males can't, like, consciously express it, whether because they're not aware of it of that absence and the importance it plays, you know, that role, or just out of pride that they don't want to admit that they want it. I mean, but that does sort of have a detrimental effect on a lot of kids, I think. Absolutely. Rob, it's been an absolute pleasure. I'm sure

you're going to write a book about luxury beliefs at some point, and we'll love to have you back on to talk about it in more detail. I know you've, before that book, which you'll write eventually, you've got another one coming out soon. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I'm writing a memoir based on my early life experiences growing up in foster homes in Los Angeles and sort of my unusual path to higher education. And the book also contains some commentary and observations about society and culture and maybe some things that we should be thinking more about. Well, I can't wait to read it. Send us a copy of it when it comes out. And before we let you go, we've got, as always, one final question for you.

Before we do our questions for our local supporters, of course, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be? Yeah, I mean, I think we've touched on a lot of the, you know, important topics to me anyway. I mean, I think childhood instability would probably be the number one question. Again, we talk a lot about poverty and economic deprivation, but I think sort of instability for children is something we should be thinking more about. Rob, it's been an absolute pleasure. If people want to find you online, where is the best place to do that?

Yeah, I launched my substack a few weeks ago, RobKHenderson.substack.com, and they can follow me on Twitter at RobK. Henderson. Fantastic. Thanks for coming on Rob, and thank you guys for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one, or also, all of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

Of all the luxury beliefs you've identified, which strikes you as the most luxurious and why? Oh, man.