TRIGGERnometry - How Family Breakdown Destroys Society - Rob Henderson

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

Rob Henderson is the author of the best-selling, ‘Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class’. He is a columnist at The Free Press and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe among others. He is known for pioneering the concept of ‘luxury beliefs’, defining them as, “ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while inflicting costs on the lower classes.” Troubled by Rob Henderson: https://linktr.ee/robkhenderson SPONSOR: Express VPN. Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/trigger/ and get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package! Go to https://givesendgo.com and raise money for anything important to you. Check out Barro’s campaign here: https://www.givesendgo.com/barro Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist 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

Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Your first memory is watching your birth mother handcuffed and taken away. You go from foster home to foster home to foster home. I got a front row seat into sort of witnessing what's been happening to families in working class communities. communities, marriage and commitments and long-term bonds. It's just not as pronounced anymore. At what point are we just going to be just really honest and go, we're failing our children?

So how does the cycle get broken? All right, Rob, welcome back to the show. Last time you were on, we talked about this concept that you actually pioneered, which is luxury beliefs. Fantastic conversation. You've since written a book, conspicuously right in the center of the table, which is absolutely which is absolutely crushing it right now. You've done every podcast in the US before us, so we're obviously annoyed with you.

However, we've got the UK first one. Great to have you on. And what a brilliant book it is. And in some ways, I have to say, it probably wasn't that hard to write in that you've had the most remarkable life story of almost anyone that sat in that chair. Yeah, it was a, I mean, thank you.

Thank you both for having me. It was a struggle, actually, to get the ideas down on the page the sort of resurfacing all of the experiences, the stories, the memories. And there was a period, especially the first half of the book, where I was surprised at how sort of fresh the feelings were from that period. You know, especially as a guy, you just feel like, oh, I can just get over it. You know, I'm a man.

Now we move on. Like, you know, I can't dwell on all of this stuff. And I think it can be useful. It can be adaptive as you're sort of striving and advancing in the world. But, you know, that was a strange period. It was the lockdown. And everyone was just kind of inside. And so it did give me that time, actually. You know, I managed to use that period to channel my energy toward writing this book. And yeah, I mean, just the way it came together, even in hindsight, you know, I've read it multiple times now going through edits and all that stuff before it came out.

And, you know, if I had known how difficult it was going to be to write it, I don't know that I actually would have agreed to it. So in a way, I'm actually glad I didn't know what it was going to be like. It's almost like, you know, I don't know, running a marathon or something like that, where you don't actually anticipate just how grueling it's going to be, but then afterwards you're like glad, you're proud that you did. And that's kind of how I feel. You've got to give yourself a break, though, because for people who haven't yet read the book, and of course we recommend that they do, like your first memory is watching your birth mother

be handcuffed and taken away. You go from foster home to foster home to foster home. Then you get adopted. you know, that family splits and someone else comes in, someone gets shot, like, then you get, you drink too much, you drug, like, I mean, every terrible experience is pretty much that human beings can have. You've had by the time you're like 20. Yeah, I mean, it was a very kind of interesting, you know, these terrible experiences,

to me, they, I've had some difficulty with this because I've read a lot of great memoirs and biographies of, you know, many guests that you guys have had on your show. And I'm like, you know, I wasn't like, I wasn't a refugee. in a totalitarian regime. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't a, you know, a poor black person in the Jim Crow era. Like, I've read very, you know, some of these stories are just horrific. And, but my book, I think, is unique in that I think most people don't anticipate just how difficult the foster care system is in the modern era. I don't think a lot of people are familiar with just how, how much deterioration and disrepair exists in kind of lower class, working class areas in the U.S. So it's kind of this

unfamiliar world. So, you know, when you hear about, you know, someone in a totalitarian regime, you kind of expect, okay, this is going to be horrible. I'm going to read about it, but I know it's going to be bad. Whereas a book like this, you're like, look, foster care system, you know, I have some thoughts about it, but let me read it. And then I think a lot of people are just shocked at just how unstable, chaotic, neglectful, emotionally, difficult it is for kids in those environments. And so, you know, I, I opened my book, the preface of the book, going through the kind of origins of my name. And I use that as a device to kind of introduce the reader into what happens to kids who go in the foster care system, you know, these not uncommon

experiences. And then, like you mentioned, after the foster care system, I was adopted into this working-class family was settled into this kind of dusty blue-collar town. in Northern California. And this was the late 90s. And of course, at the time I wasn't aware of this, but, you know, because I was a little kid, but in hindsight, now I understand after reading kind of interesting sociological studies, ethnographic research, that I got a front row seat into sort of witnessing what's been happening to families in working class communities sort of all across the country. I mean, all across the Western world, really, that this is not unique just to the U.S. or even just to the U.K. And, yeah, just communicating those experiences.

experiences firsthand, I don't just talk about my experiences either. You know, I didn't want this book to just be this kind of, you know, oh, this bootstrap story. You know, he had a difficult life, but then he, you know, worked really hard and rose above it. And I guess that is one way to look at it, but I wanted people to understand the kind of modal or most common experience of a young male in this kind of environment. And so I had several close friends growing up in Red Bluff, California. and I describe their lives and their experiences and kind of where they ended up. And I wanted the reader to understand that you can't expect, you know, every single kid who

grows up this way to have the outcome that I had. These are the outcomes that are statistically the most likely. So, you know, I had most of my friends, they weren't in foster care, you know, raised by single moms. I had a friend raised by a single dad, a friend raised by his grandmother because his mom was on drugs and his dad was in prison. And that's kind of a common picture of these communities. And, you know, where did they end up?

I mean, I had two friends who went to prison. I had another friend who was shot. I have, you know, the rest of my friends kind of in these, you know, menial jobs that are not particularly satisfying to them. And, you know, friends who have two children with two different women who they don't speak to. Like, this is not, you know, this is, you know, this is surprisingly and sadly, it's just this is common. And Rob, you're talking about your friends who went down a different path. You're obviously a really bright guy. You went to an Ivy League college.

You went to Cambridge. Do you think that the difference between you and them is intellectual slash academic ability? Or do you think it's something else? So, yeah, I get into discussions and friendly debates with people, more so on the right, I think, who I think they overvalue the importance of academic ability where they you know they read some studies

about IQ and intelligence and then I think like oh that that explains the world now and I think it's a piece of the puzzle but it's not the whole story so you know the short version is I think that intelligence or academic ability is

necessary but not sufficient to do well and I tell these stories in the book about how my curiosity and my aptitude and my interest in school, it would kind of wax and wane depending on my environment. And so I tell a story in the seventh foster home I lived in. You know, I was changing homes every three to six months. I was changing schools all the time. It was just a jumble of chaos. And so by the time I was in this seventh foster home, the teacher and the social worker and my foster mom, they were so concerned with my lack of academic

performance that they had a psychologist come and administer an IQ test because they thought it might have had a learning disability. And I took the test and it was like a very, you know, I scored below average overall on the IQ test. And on the verbal portion, I scored something like an 80, which is more than a standard deviation below the average. And that was because no one read to me, changing schools all the time. There was no external pressure or guidance or encouragement to pick up a book. And I had to teach myself to read. You know, I was taking this test and I gave it like a kind of half-hearted effort. You know, one of the things that people don't understand about IQ tests is if you score really high on an IQ test, it probably means you're pretty smart. If you score low on

IQ test, that could be for a variety of reasons. It could be because you're not very academically inclined, but it could be because you're tired, you're hungry, you're neglected, your abilities haven't been, yeah, you can't concentrate, your abilities haven't been cultivated, you're not attending school or if you are, it's the kind of school that I had where it's like, oh, you're changing school district again and again and again. And so I think that could explain it. And then the other was just effort. Like I had this, I described in the book, this kind of simmering anger and resentment and rage that I had toward adults. You know, I talk about how, you know, after you're let down by so many adults in your early life, eventually you learn to let yourself

down. And so this was kind of an outlet for my aggression where the, you know, the psychologist is like, you know, he showed me a picture, you know, one of the questions, he showed me this picture of this bald guy. And he has a comb pressed to his head and he has no hair. And so the psychologist asks me, uh, what's happening in this photo? And I say, um, it's a guy combing his hair or his head. And the psychologist and says, well, is there anything unusual about this picture? And I thought the question was stupid. And I thought the question was stupid. And I thought the test was, I was just like, this whole thing is stupid. You know, I've never seen this person in my life. This is like another adult. The system has assigned to help me, even though I never felt like I was

being helped. And so I just said, no, it looks, looks fine. And it wasn't because I was dumb or because I didn't understand. It was just like, I know what you want me to say. I'm not going to say it. And then there were some other parts of the test, too, where it was like, you know, here's a picture of a fire truck and they gave me this ruler. They wanted me to measure the truck. I'm like, oh, this is kind of fun. It's interesting. It's tactile. So I would put in an effort for that. But look, all of this is to say that, look, I scored very low on this test. And so, but then later on, when I was adopted, there were periods of stability in my early life.

My grades would improve. I tell this story about how after I had to teach myself to read, I eventually got third place at the school spelling bee, you know, within a very short period of time after I started reading. And then, you know, there was there were divorces and separate. and more disorder and chaos, and my grades would kind of reflect that in school. And so I think there are probably a lot of kids who are from these kind of deteriorating neighborhoods who are smart and who would be academically inclined, but they're just weighed down. Not so much by the poverty.

You know, I do talk a bit about the material poverty, but more so by the disorder and the chaos and the uncertainty and instability. I think that's a much stronger that has to be a lot more. a much stronger effect on a child's sort of academic performance. And I set research and studies in the book that are reflective of that. It's absolutely true. I remember when I used to teach kids who were so bright, so smart. And the heartbreaking thing was, is that you would see them come in.

And many of them, the vast majority, wouldn't be able to leave their background at the door because they're a kid. There was, you know, the odd one who succeeded in spite of everything, but that was an anomaly. The vast majority were just like you. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like, there are glimmers of this. You know, I tell the stories where I'm interacting with my friends and I'm the only one who reads for pleasure in high school. I'm the only one who regularly visits the school library. But my grades were the same. And we were all kind of C-minus students. And, you know, like I did the bare minimum. I was kind of a C-minus slacker stoner kid in high school. And I just didn't feel like I needed to put in an effort once I kind of decided that, College wasn't in the cards for me. You know, I knew we couldn't afford it.

And I, you know, it wasn't a common ambition of the people around me. I talk about there's one kid who I was kind of friendly with. We weren't close, but he went off to kind of a local state school. And he was the straight A student. He was the smartest kid that we thought of in our client. Who's this guy? And he went off to a state school. But I wasn't, you know, I didn't see myself in that way.

And so once I realized, oh, I'm not going to go to college. I just, you know, kind of mailed it in and didn't even. and think about my future until kind of the last minute. But yeah, I mean, it's just one of the points I also make in the book is that, you know, even if every single kid who grew up the way that I did goes off to some, you know, fancy Ivy League school and attains the kind of conventional badges of success that we're also focused on when we talk about social mobility, educational attainment, occupational prestige, future earnings. Even if they do attain all of those things, it's not going to

suddenly heal the wounds or the scars of their early life. I came to this realization at some point that, you know, it's nice. It's better than not having those things. But, you know, it's not worth the trade-off. You know, there's this common line. I'm so glad I went through everything I went through because it made me who I am today. And I kind of have the opposite view where I think most of the time people who live through very difficult early life circumstances and and then later achieve some level of success and flourishing, I think they succeed despite those experiences, not because of them. Because, you know, very few people would wish those experiences on their loved ones or their own children or the people around them. I certainly wouldn't. So, you know, I think that

we focus too much on what happens after the age of 18 of, okay, where do these kids go off? you know, kids from poor or poor homes, foster homes, and so on, where do they go next after they graduate high school, or if they graduate high school and what's next? Whereas I'm focused more on, you know, this is kind of a coming of age memoir, and I talk about zero to 17 or 18 and how, you know, my friends, I'm not entirely certain that even in the best of environments that they would have gone onto some, you know, fancy school. They weren't interested in school. And I'm not entirely convinced that even if they were raised by two parents, stable home, upper middle class area, if their interests would have changed that much. But I do think that even if they

don't go off to college, they still would have deserved to have a stable, safe, secure childhood where they're not surrounded by poverty and addiction and substance abuse and people making self-defeating decisions and neglect and just sort of day-to-day chaos. It's still important to try to minimize those experiences, regardless of how the future looks for them. And so, and the other thing is like, you know, even if social mobility were our goal, social mobility in the sense of conventional badges of success, education and earnings and so on, one of the number, actually the number one predictor of whether or not someone graduates from college is if they were raised by two parents. And so even if we wanted them to go to college, and that was our goal, which I'm not convinced

that should be our goal, but even if it were. Yeah, sort of promoting and cultivating stable family, stable community, stable environments. I mean, I tell you guys a story that I eventually left on the cutting room floor. So it's not in the book, but it was in an early draft of the manuscript where, you know, there are a couple of stories. So one was, so my sister might watch this, but I'll tell it anyway. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs.

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There was a divorce. And so my adoptive mom raised us for a little while. And my mom was working full time. And, you know, so she'd work long hours, try to pay the bills. She had other obligations. Her attention and resources were spread very thin. And so then, you know, she'd come home. She'd make dinner for us.

And my sister would, you know, she'd make some chicken and some rice and some, you know, broccoli or something or a salad, something healthy, nutritious. And my sister would say, you know, I want chicken nuggets, you know, I want pizza. I want corn dogs, you know, kind of the, you know, junk food that American kids like to eat. And, you know, sometimes my mom would give in because she was tired because she, you know, understandably so. Okay, here you go. But then later, when my mom fell in love with a woman named Shelley, who I read about it in the book, they would give in less frequently because it's different when you have two parents present. And suddenly you can kind of negotiate, you can tag team, like, I'm frazzled, I'm tired, can you handle this, and then the

other parent can kind, and you can sort of switch off that way. And so when people talk about things like childhood obesity and how it's particularly prevalent in low-income communities, I don't think people are thinking about that, that when you have a single mom who's frazzled. And the other thing is like, like, this didn't exist when I was a kid, but the shocking difference in terms of screen use. So kids in the years, U.S. from families who earn $35,000 or less per year, spend two hours more per day on screens than kids from families who earn $100,000 or more per year. So basically, poor kids spend two hours using screens more per day than kids from rich families. And I think that's part of it,

that if you're a lone parent, you don't have a lot of money, you don't have a lot of income, and your kid is, you know, being disruptive, misbehaving, you just give them an iPad and say, hey, chill out, here you go. But if you have two parents, you're thinking, okay, interact with the kid. Again, you can sort of trade off in that way. Well, you've basically, basically got more time between the two of you two of you two months twice as much but i think it's even more than that i mean even just having those little breaks can go a long way yeah um yeah where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts kind of thing yeah the other story is that i that i left out of the book was um you know there was a when i was when i was 13 i had this friend christian and he was

raised by a single mom his dad was in prison and um one day him and his mom got in a fight they got in a huge yelling match in the middle of the night. He was 13. And she said something like, you know, if you don't want to live here, get the hell out of here or something. And he was, you know, he thought he was this tough 13 year old kid. So he was like, fine. And he walks out of their apartment. And then suddenly he realizes he has nowhere to go. And, you know, he has a few friends. And at that time when we were 13, I was the only one who had two parents. I had my mom and I had Shelly. And we had our house. And it was a small house. But we had two parents. And of the five friends he could have called, he called me, and he came over to our house. And, you know,

my mom, this is the middle of the night. My mom and Shelley sit him down and ask what happened. And they sort of speak with him and say, hey, you know, you can stay with us, but we're going to have to call your mom. She has a right to know where you are, that kind of thing. And he stayed with us for about two weeks. And, you know, at the time, I thought it was just cool that I had my friends staying over. But in hindsight, I think that the reason he chose to stay with us rather than our other friends is because he felt safer. When you have two adults present who trust one another and care about one another, kids can sense that and they feel safer. And it creates a sort of space for kids to express themselves, to trust not just the adults, but the other kids around them. And the whole

sort of atmosphere changes when you have two adults present who have a strong bond with one another versus just the one by themselves, just one adult and a bunch of kids, just completely different. And yeah, he stayed with us and he felt better. And so if you multiply that across like a neighborhood of two parent families versus one parent families, the whole vibe changes in that area, right? And so I think that's something else that people don't really think about is it's not just the resources that the other parent brings, but it's the kind of intangible benefits of emotional trust and security in those things as well. And Rob, one of the things I love about your book is in addition to talking about your personal story, you weave it into culture. and politics and the social fabric of what's going on. And I think people will have a flavor now from what you've just talked about,

about essentially some of the issues that you're highlighting, that have become very difficult to talk about. I mean, I remember I was recently on question time in this country, and I was asked a question about knife crime, and I talked about the fact that as long as we've got a, you know, a skyrocketing divorce rate, and lots of young men are growing up without dads, this is going to happen.

And the internet basically said, oh, he's a racist. And I didn't mention anyone's race, but this is how we now think about it. And, you know, it's so sad to me because you're not a parent yet. No. You aren't. When my son was born, you get these visits from the health visitor to come and see it. And like my wife and I, we don't have any family living nearby. I was basically just me and her, which is really hard with a baby,

especially the first time. you have no idea what you're doing. So we were kind of like basically surviving, coping. We were still doing okay, but basically we felt like we were having a hard time of it. And then this health visitor came around and she was there for like 10 minutes and she said, oh, it's amazing what you guys have because so few children have this nowadays. And our subjective experience was that we were struggling, but her experience from the outside was like, oh, this is rare now.

And I was like, I don't envy those other kids. So the thing that you're raising really is that we now live in a society where increasing number of children are effectively having a worse and worse and worse childhood experience because of the breakdown of the family. Yeah. And the breakdown of the family is primarily in kind of lower income, kind of working class areas. I mean, so we hear about these snapshot aggregate statistics. And they're roughly, you know, they're roughly the same in the U.S. and the UK. something on the order 40 to 45% of children in both countries are raised by unmarried parents. But, you know, that's 40 to 45%.

But then, you know, it's funny. Like, I speak with college educated people now. And they're like 40, like, I can't think of a single friend. Or maybe they have one. They have like the one token divorced friend or the one token. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, so they have a group. But then, and so that's their experience.

But, you know, these things are very strongly divided along class lines. And so in the U.S., like where I grew up in California, it's everyone. Like it's not even, like, I can't even, no, no, you know what? I had one friend with married parents, but even they had some, there was some infidelity and some issues there. But that was like, so it's the reverse experience where you have a bunch of people raised in various kind of family configurations. And then you have like the one token friend who has two parents.

And, and yeah, so, you know, I cite some statistics in the book about how in 1960, 95% of children in the U.S. were raised by both of their birth. with parents, and by 2005, it had dropped slightly for the upper class from 95% to 85% and for working class, children born and working class families, it dropped from 95% to 30% by 2005. And my guess is today it's even more pronounced sort of that gap, the magnitude to that gap. And it's funny, you know, people who say that this is like a racist statement to point out, I mean, where I grew up. So the foster homes I lived in, it was very sort of mixed race. You know, you had Hispanic kids, you know, a couple Asian kids, black kids, white,

It was very sort of mixed. But when I moved to Red Bluff, this town in Northern California, located in one of the poorest counties in the state, it's a part of California no one even knows about. It's just completely overlooked, kind of, you know, forgotten. And it's majority white with a very strong kind of Hispanic population as well. I mean, my high school is probably roughly like 60% white, 30-something percent Hispanic, and then we had a handful of black and Asian kids. but most of my friends were white and Hispanic, and they were blue collar working class,

and their families look rough. I mean, I don't know if you could call someone racist for pointing this out that white working class families in the U.S. look very unstable, and they continue to sort of deteriorate like this. And, you know, it's funny, like my, so I went my, I learned a new piece of information so the last time I spoke to you guys. So I knew that my mom, my birth mom, my birth, mother was Korean. So I know it's Korean on her side. She was from Seoul. She came to the U.S.

And I grew up thinking, okay, I'm like mixed-race Asian. I didn't really know anything about my dad. Supposedly, I was named after him, but that's the only information that I have. So some forensic psychologist interviewed my mom and his name was Robert, but she didn't know anything else about him. And so I took a 23-in-me, a genetic ancestry test last year, and discover that I'm half Hispanic on my father's side. And, you know, in high side, it's like, you know, I was born in L.A. It's like, you know, it's okay, I'm half Mexican. Yeah. A big surprise. And so I didn't know this about myself. But, you know, like, it's, it's, like, it is, I just think, like, the whole preoccupation with race is misguided because I went my whole life not really caring

or not really thinking that much about it. And, you know, but people seem to think it matters now. people will ask me about it and it's like it's interesting kind of the like racial consciousness or preoccupation with race is actually higher in more educated environments like i didn't even think of myself as like a half asian person until i step foot on campus and then suddenly it's like you know people are like asking me about my experiences and like this becomes but you know when you're when you're in a poor environment like the thing that matters most is that you don't have money like that's kind of the commonality it's like you don't have enough money um and that sort of bonds people together But yeah, the line that I use now is, you know, I didn't know I was half a Spenic, I just thought I was Asian, so I went to bed white adjacent and then I woke up as an underrepresented minority.

But, you know, we joke about this. And obviously, it's funny, but do you think sometimes our overfocus on race is the fact that we've lost our roots? We kind of don't know who we are anymore. So we kind of attach or grasp at these certain things, you know, like race. race, like gender. But like you were saying yourself, the race wasn't important. What was important is where you grew up, your roots. Those are actually what made you. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, yeah, that we, I think now we're kind of grasping for identity now. That's an interesting point. That if you're, so most people who grow up in low-income communities actually never leave. And so it's like, this is my hometown. These are my people. This is my family. And so they have that sense of connectedness. But for a lot of people who go off to college, you know, they go to another state or another city and they feel maybe kind of unmoored from their roots or they never really

had them to begin with, you're sort of floundering around trying to find out who am I. And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of people get sort of obsessed with race. And it's like sort of this reverse kind of, we kind of went full circle back to racial consciousness. But from like this stance of sympathy or something. I just heard this story. I don't remember which college this was in the U.S. where this was a university, unsurprisingly, and they were like, you know, the white professors and students and academics, there was something like, you know, only white people can attend this meeting. And the reasoning was something like, because people of color had, can you swear? Can you swear? Yeah, yeah. They're basically like, people of color have had enough of our shit and we don't need

to subject them to us. So we're just going to have a white people meeting. And I'm like, do you guys realize what this sounds like that like we're just going to have white people only at this speed that it's like they sort of like reverse rationalize themselves into this position of like racial segregation again and it's just mind blowing just how um uh uh like narrow minded and and and just sort of i mean i think like ultimately this could be very dangerous this way of thinking in a multi-ethnic democracy where suddenly we're talking about race and how race is so salient and important but i think yeah the the connectedness and roots have something to do with it No, I totally agree with you.

And one of my favorite Thomas Soul quotes is when he talks about how I was, you know, racism never worked. And that's why I didn't support it. And that's why I don't want to put it under new management. You know what I mean? And that's kind of what we're doing. But, you know, interesting. Just I wanted to come back a little bit because one of the things you talked about was the deterioration of working class communities. And I suppose the inevitable question is, like, why is this?

happening, why it's been such a powerful drive that has pulled, you know, families apart or people have just got to a point where, as you say, in particularly in poorer communities, you're much less likely to be growing up with a single parent raising you than a more typical family. Yeah, yeah. And it's, yeah, it's a good question. You know, I think that the kind of received wisdom in the U.S., and probably in Western countries overall, is poverty, that when you don't have money, that it just becomes harder to find a partner and form a stable marriage and there's just added stress. And I think that's probably part of the story.

But again, you know, to cite that earlier statistic in 1960, kids across the social classes, 95% of them were born to two married parents. Poor people existed in 1960, and arguably they were poorer than they are now. because that was before the rise of like the great society programs and state benefits and all of these things. You know, I read this article in The New Yorker a couple of years ago, and it was kind of this interesting excerpt, especially in a publication like the New Yorker where they said, you know, back decades ago, if you were poor, it meant that you couldn't eat. Whereas now if you're poor, it means you have access to state benefits and food stamps. And it's not, you know, it's not fun to be on food stamps. and it's not, you know, that's not like your ideal way of life, but it's better than not, you know, going like days without food.

And so I don't think poverty is the whole story. And especially if you visit other countries, so I've spent some time in developing countries and I've seen that families don't look the same. The other day I was walking through an airport. This guy from Kenya recognized me. And he was like, yeah, I agree with you that it's not just poverty. Because when I go home to Kenya, like, our families are like, we're poor, but like the families are intact and people like know their neighbors. And, you know, they, so I think that culture has a big and important role to play here that, you know, decades ago, I'm thinking about, like, my, my adoptive grandparents, that generation. So my grandfather, he dropped out of school when he was in eighth grade. And, you know, he and my grandmother got married when they were very young and very poor. And they lived, you know, through the sort of back end of the Great Depression and they had kids. And, you know, despite material poverty, there was still this sort of culture.

this norm around them to stay together, you know, take care of your kids, take care of your family. And then, you know, as the generations kind of wore on, it's like, you know, their kids, you know, my sort of my adoptive mom and aunts and uncles in that generation, all of them got married and all of them have kids and then all of them got divorced. And this is kind of working class life, right? And now they have kids, like my generation, my cousins, and they have kids and they've never been married. And so it's like you can sort of see the cultural shifts over time.

where marriage gradually becomes less important. People are still kind of having kids, but just out of wedlock. And so I think that's part of what's going on here is that marriage and commitment and long-term bonds, it's just not as pronounced anymore. I mean, it's interesting. If you look at the statistics over time, starting in the early 1960s,

across classes, divorce rates and single-parenthood actually spiked across the socioeconomic ladder. So, you know, rich people, upper middle class people, they actually got divorced and started having kids out of wedlock starting in late 60s throughout the 70s. And by the 1980s, though, they had kind of reverted back to their original figure of, you know, basically getting married and having kids in stable, committed relationships. Whereas for sort of lower class, working class communities, they sort of followed, you know, they marched in lockstep with the upper class. They started to get divorced. They started having kids out of wedlock.

That was kind of the norm. That was kind of this cool, cool, chic thing. to do. And but by the 1980s, they had never, they had never reverted. They just sort of continued to deteriorate and got worse and worse and never recovered. So, you know, the kind of stylized story, I think, is that for educated and affluent people, they kind of experimented a bit and said, well, actually, let's, you know, this might be fun to, like, experiment and have different families and have kids out of wedlock and so on, or

maybe, you know, get divorced. And then they kind of came to their senses and thought, actually, this isn't so good for the kids. It's not so good for the family. Maybe it's not as fun for me as I thought it would be. And they sort of returned back to those norms. Whereas for the lower classes, they just kind of fell apart and never came back together again. And do you think this is caused by the sexual revolution? We've obviously had people like Louise Perry on to talk about this.

And not to oversimplify her argument because she's a very intelligent, sophisticated thinker. But effectively, once you have the pill and people can have sex without necessarily the consequences, then you start to develop abortion, which is a method of managing that. And you actually start to see way more abortions as a result. And basically, once you separate sex from its consequences, actually what you then end up is a lack of commitment, lack of stability, and that changes the culture.

Do you think that's it? There will be other people like the Thomas Soles, by the way, who will say, well, it was about the government. The government came in and started incentivizing single-parenthood by giving money to single women if they had kids and no man in the house. And on and on it goes. There are different arguments. What do you think really caused this cultural shift they're talking about? I mean, I think all of those things are kind of intertwined.

I do think that the culture shifted before the policies did. I mean, if you sort of look at when the Great Society programs were introduced, I mean, it was all kind of, so the birth control pill was introduced. 1960, but the sort of forces and the raw ingredients of the sexual revolution were kind of already in place where there was sort of this wellspring of support for sexual freedom on college campuses in sort of elite institutions and communities among, more so among young people, but kind of across the board. And then I think that in turn helped to fuel the policy changes and to support sort of more access to birth control and all those kinds of things. And so, I mean, I think interestingly, kind of reproductive technology may have backfired.

You know, there was a really interesting report from Brookings in the 1990s that talked about kind of the decline in marriage rates and shotgun marriage rates in particular about how in the past, you know, when a man got a woman pregnant, there were all of these sort of cultural forces in place that said, You have to marry her. You have to take care of her. You know, and so on. And then with the introduction of the pill and abortion and so on, then it became, like the norm shifted because suddenly the burden was on the woman. You know, no one forced you to get pregnant. No one's forcing you to carry the child to term. The man felt like he was kind of exonerated. He's off the hook. The entire community kind of became aware that, yeah, she's pregnant, but, you know, do you really have to force him to marry her? Because she has all these options for what to do next. And so everything changed after that. Whereas before the was a lot of sort of burden and responsibility placed on a man who got a woman pregnant. And I also think it's interesting that, you know, just as a thought experiment, if you were to travel back to 1945, say, and you were to ask people, you know, in the future, there's going to be

this pill you can take and women won't get pregnant. And then even if they do, abortions will be, you know, more or less accessible. I know that, you know, recent changes and so forth, but far more accessible than in 1945 to get an abortion. Then you ask these people, do you think that there will be more children born out of wedlock or fewer? Do you think that there will be more children in foster homes and orphanages and institutions are fewer? Do you think that there will be sort of more divorces or fewer and so on and so forth? I think most people would say like, oh, like, yeah, that sounds like utopia. Like, you know, no parents ever going to have a kid unless they don't want to or if they do or whatever. And, you know,

you're not going to have kids sort of flooding these institutions anymore. and actually, yeah, foster children, orphanage, all these things have actually sort of worsened over time. Interesting, I just saw this statistic the other day that since 2000, the number of kids who've entered foster care in the U.S. has doubled. And this is largely due to drug use and addiction. And some of this is due to the opioid crisis as well, that more kids are being neglected or abused at home. And so then they get placed into care. And so, you know, I think what's going on here, and this is just speculation. I don't know of any research on this question.

question, but it's something like, you know, a lot of people, especially people who, you know, don't have much in the way of resources or education, they have a lot of sex with different people. They have a lot of hookups. And they may sort of start out with the best of intentions of, you know, take the birth control, you know, abortion, all these things. And then there's a pregnancy that occurs. And then what ends up happening is that the child is just born anyway and born to unmarried parents. And that's, I think that that's a lot of what happens here is that it's not as simple as, you know, someone gets pregnant and then immediately they can find a way to, to bypass that. There's another point here. And I think there's something to this. So, you know, the book I write about how

my mom's partner, Shelly, had three teenage daughters and they all had kids by the time they were 16 years old. And none of them were, I mean, they weren't even in a relationship with the child's father, let it want married. But, you know, observing them, you know, in hindsight, I was reading the book. I thought about this, this book I'd read called Promises I Can Keep by these two Princeton sociologists. And in this book, these two sociologists sort of describe their interactions and interviews with single mothers across the U.S. in different communities, white mothers, Hispanic mothers, black mothers. And one sort of common feature that these sociologists point out is that these women, you know, they had really hard lives.

Maybe they were raised by a single mom themselves. They grew up poor. They'd been kind of jilted and mistreated by the men in their lives. And then they have a kid. And that's like the one person in the world who they can love without reservation and who they know will love them back. And so I thought about this when I was growing up with these teenage moms. And I saw a lot of that, that they were sort of mistreated by these guys who they slept with.

And they didn't have a lot of guidance in their lives and just a lot of negative experiences. but now they have a baby. And I remember, like, they were close and they love these kids and so on, and they're probably a bit too permissive and bordering on neglect in some cases. But it was like, I could see that they were different with the baby than they were with a lot of other people in their lives. And I think that's, you know, there are all of these kind of non-material, sort of non-economic reasons for a lot of this.

A lot of it's just sort of psychology, behavior, emotions. All of those things can, I think, help to explain, like, why it is that, you know, what other options do you have for fulfillment, too, other than being a mother, even if it's not in ideal circumstances, whereas if you are educated and affluent, there's so many options ahead of you for how you can live your life, and then you can have a family as a kind of capstone to a successful career, and it doesn't quite look like that in lower income communities, too. So in the absence of norms, you just see these changes. I think it's a really profound point, because I remember when I was teaching in those types

of communities, in East London and Cornwall and other places, one thing that I noticed, particularly actually with the white kids, it may have been different where you grew up, because white working class boys are the lowest achieving subgroup in education, is there was a sense of hopelessness. They felt, you just, it was palpable

with these kids. They came from generation after generation of people who had just given up. So I used to work in a school with there was a lot of immigrant kids there. And the difference in attitude between those kids whose parents had come from Nigeria who were

living in the same area and had the same educational experiences, their attitude, their behavior, their ambitions, completely different. You would look at these kids and know that they would go on to have a career and they would go on to achieve and, you know, have the best possible life for themselves. But you look at these other kids who've been in that community for generations and they were lost and it was heartbreaking. Yeah. Yeah, I think that kind of hopelessness is pervasive when you, I mean, you know, when you're in an environment, too, where people around you aren't very ambitious, where it's just, you know, no one's really thinking about the future, too. No one's really thinking that far ahead. I mean, the kind of outlook that I can remember having

when I was a teenager, it was kind of like two, two lenses. One was the immediate present slash, like, you know, immediate future. It was like this weekend, basically. And it was like, you know, how are we going to get beer and get fucked up this weekend kind of thing? And then it was like distant, distant future. It was like immediate future and then distant future of like someday I'm going to have a house and a nice car and whatever, an indoor gym and all the kind of things that young boys want. But then there was no sort of mental image, no way to envision like the bridge between this, you know, now and the weekend and getting drunk and then that future in 20 years.

of me living in a nice house with a nice car. Like, how do I get there? It's not going to be spending every weekend just drinking and having fun. But I wasn't connecting those dots. I wasn't thinking in that way. But that is a common way of thinking of just like, you know, as far as it went, I could think of. So I had two jobs in high school.

One, I was a dishwasher at a restaurant. And then the other, I was a bag boy at a grocery store. And, you know, in these environments, I had, like, a lot of coworkers. And, like, they would play the lottery. And that was kind of, like, their way to, like, fantasize about getting getting rich in the future. And, but yeah, I never, never really sort of interact with people who were like, well, you know, I'm going to night school, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, I'm trying to improve myself.

Very few of those kinds of people. Part of it, I think, too, is I think there is a little bit of the phenomenon of, you know, what some people call like brain drain of, and I talk a bit about this in the book, too. I criticize this idea of what I call trickle-down meritocracy or trickle-down diversity, of this idea that, you know, somehow if you can get people at the very top to accurately reflect the demographics of the society as a whole, that somehow we've achieved equity. And so it's like, you know, as long as the top, as long as the ruling class is, you know,

50% women and X percent LGBT and X percent Asian, Hispanic and whatever, that somehow we've achieved the goals of social justice. Whereas I'm thinking, okay, well, even if, you know, the seats at Harvard or Yale match the demographics of the country as a whole, what does that mean? for the people who are actually at the bottom, who are actually, like, how do those benefits trickle down to the rest of society into these poor communities, low-income communities? And so what happens is I think a lot of these elite institutions kind of strip mine talented people out of these communities.

And they never go back. So, like, you know, I'll just be honest. I'm never going to go back to Red Bluff. I'll visit, but I'm not going to live there. And I noticed this when I think about it. And this is happening across the country. I think it's happening around the world now with ease of geographic mobility is. you know, where I came from, if you had, if you were smart and you had ambition, you went off to

college, maybe local state school. And if you, you know, maybe weren't so academically inclined, but you still had some ambition like I did, you go join the military. And then you don't, you know, usually don't go back. And so I think that's happening too, where, you know, a lot of the hopelessness is like a lot of the people who are going places and who do have ambition, they just like get out of there as soon as they can. And so more and more you sort of look around and you don't see a lot of good examples. The other thing is I think you also have a lot of negative examples too is, you know, when you have people who are criminally inclined and unlawful and they're kind of sticking around and when you're 15, 16, 17 years old and you're seeing people do drugs or steal cars or whatever,

it's kind of fun, it's kind of exciting. And our culture does very little to combat the kind of romanticism of criminality. And so, you know, it's like easy to sort of get sucked into that and then just sort of fall into these negative behavioral patterns and then never, never get out. out. Some people have asked me how I, you know, why was my life different? You know, we talked about the academic stuff. I think part of it was just I got out of there as soon as I could. I was 17. As soon as I graduated high school, I left for basic training in the Air Force and I never went back. Whereas all of my friends stayed and I could easily imagine my life spiraling out of control if I had stayed in Red Bluff. Like when I was 17, I was drinking and driving a lot. Like if nothing else,

that could have destroyed my life was just how frequently I would just like get drunk, blackout drunk and go racing down the highway with my friends or something. That was like a common behavior. And so, you know, I think like that those kind of examples too around you, the sort of absence of positive and then the pervasiveness of the negative contributes. It's such a, it's such a great point because when you talk to kids from this particular area, if they don't have parents, dads who are in medicine or in finance or in insurance or whatever it may be, then how are they going to know to do those particular careers? And the only only thing, careers that they can see being viable to them is, oh, someone became an athlete or someone

became a soccer player or whatever it was. Because those were the only people who came from that community and then to make it and are visible. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right, that it's, it goes for careers, of course, that, you know, what's, what's immediately around you, those are the possibilities you have. I mean, it's funny. Like, I've written about my, like, one reason I think, in addition to getting out of there as soon as I could was, like, why I went off to college was because I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid, and a lot of the characters I would see and the shows I would watch, they kind of romanticized and glorified the college experience. You know, like, I watched Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and I think it was season three where there's,

you know, just plot line after plot line of Will and Carlton, you know, how to apply to college, you know, which college are you going to, that kind of thing. And I'm watching this and I'm like, man, college is so important for these people. And so planted in my mind that college was something to aspire to. Even if I didn't do it right after high school, it did sort of introduce the idea, but no one around me was going to college. And I think that may have been why I didn't go immediately. But I think in addition to the career piece, it's also true for the family piece. And this is something I think a lot of people don't think about is, you know, yes, like kids will be less likely to get into lucrative careers if the adults around them aren't doing those

kinds of things. But I also think kids are less likely to form families and form committed relationships if they don't see adults around them doing that. And so, you know, you could imagine like a young kid in an upper middle class neighborhood. We'll say he, you know, he has two married parents, all of his friends, two married parents. You know, that's kind of the norm in that area where he lives. And then, okay, so he turns on the TV or he opens up TikTok or a magazine or, you know, just all the pop culture he absorbs. And, you know, he's seeing people in like polycules and he's seeing open marriages and he's seeing a lot of promiscuity in these kind of these windows into other lifestyles. But the default for this kid is, well, his mom and dad are married and the people around him are married.

And so that's like a counterweight to what he's seeing in the outside world. But now imagine someone who grows up where I grew up and you're not, you know, you're raised by a single mom or you're raised in foster homes or something like that. And then all of your friends are raised in various kind of different family configurations. And you're not actually ever seeing what a healthy committed marriage looks like in your everyday life. And then you open up TikTok and a magazine and pop culture and everything. And again, it's, you know, open marriages and promiscuity and all these things. And so no matter where you turn, you're not really seeing what a healthy marriage looks like. And I think that too can help to explain what's happening in these low-income areas where marriage is at an all-time low and families are deteriorating and fragmenting and so on. It's just, you know, not only are you firsthand not seeing it, what a relationship looks like, but even the pop culture and images you consume around you, it's unavailable to you. And not only unavailable, but actually promoting the opposite of what is healthy. And this is what I was going to ask you about, because it seems to me that what you're really

saying is there's a vicious cycle going on and it's self-reinforcing. So you create a different set of sexual norms in the 60s. More people get divorced. You get more people growing up in the sort of circumstances that you grew up. That's traumatizing to them. And, you know, people are wary of saying that. But I imagine, you know, going from foster home to foster home to foster home and many of the other experiences you had, you kind of alluded to it.

Like, you wouldn't wish it on your children or probably even your worst enemy, right? So then how do you cope with that? well, one of the ways you cope with that is taking drugs. So you take drugs. Then you have more kids without getting, and it just goes round and around. And the question is, and I think this is really interesting to talk about with you, is how does that cycle get broken? And I use the passive voice deliberately because increasingly we only talk about it in terms of how do we break this cycle. And that means the government has to come in and do something. And I was curious about I'm not someone who's ideological about this. I don't think the government, you know, the government shouldn't do

anything. I think there are lots of areas where the government actually has a massive role to play, for example, science, right? There are areas of human research that are never going to get funded to achieve the results we want unless the government steps in. I mean, Oppenheimer is a very good kind of visual example of that. So how does the cycle get broken, in your opinion? Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. And You know, I thought about this, you know, what have been other sort of successful cultural shifts, what campaigns have been introduced to change human behavior on a mass scale. One thing that comes to mind is like the changing attitudes around smoking over time.

So the number of Americans who smoke, it's dropped by half since the early 1980s, which is like a massive cultural shift. Like smoking used to be like chewing gum. You know, it was just like a sort of a habit that people would do or drinking coffee. It was just a part of your life. You built it in to your daily routine. And now it's like it's weird to smoke. And it's not only did the government sort of introduced laws and there were regulations

about where you could smoke and for how long and how far you had to be from a building and, you know, the warning signs and the labels and everything. But there were also cultural shifts around shame and stigma that, you know, now it's kind of socially acceptable that if someone smokes, you can kind of say like, wow, you know, you know, like, what are you doing? Rob wants to ban, ban single parents from bars. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, 100 feet, meters, you know, from the bar.

You stand over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's the single parent section and the, yeah, excellent. Well, make sure that they're outside as well. Yeah. Well, I just remember, like, in the 90s, when I would watch TV shows as a kid, it was like every third commercial. Yeah.

Was like, you know, like the woman with the hole in her neck. and telling you how she had neck cancer, tracheotomy, or whatever it is. And I remember this being like, this is kind of disturbing to watch this. And like, I still smoke cigarettes and I were like, but I do think like in the aggregate, having all of this messaging around you,

it didn't make it harder. Like it made it harder to obtain cigarettes. It made it harder to like smoke without people judging you or looking at you, whatever. And I think like, you know, if we could find a way to sort of introduce a similar campaign around sort of children and family and relationship. So, you know, there is that concern, right? Like, you're shaming single parents. You might

be shaming single moms. You don't want to make them feel bad. Single moms work very hard. I was raised by a single mom for a time. I understand it. And I had friends who were raised by single moms, and I have a lot of respect for them. I had a friend raised by a single dad, a similar story. And I do think there's, you know, Warren Farrell, you know, he uses this term fatherless homes or father absence. And I think this is a, it's a unique reframe. It's useful because now you're not really putting the burden and the responsibility and the blame so much on the mother who's working hard, but you're putting more of the blame or focus at least on the father who's not there, who's not present. And I think that can be useful too. I mean, you'll probably still get called racist and all

these things. This is what I was going to say, Rob, isn't the problem really? And I don't know if you know Melissa Chen well, but she's a very good friend of ours. And her and I talk about this all the time, which is, you know, she comes from a Singaporean background. And the attitudes to shame and stigma are very different in her culture, as they are in mine, by the way, like, coming from Russia, I don't have the same. It seems to me that in Western society, we've got a stigma about stigma. You cannot ever say that anyone should be ashamed of anything. I don't think that's true, though. I think, like, it's true. Except having the wrong opinions about, you know, social justice or whatever. So I think, like, the shame and stigma has been kind of dismantled for, you know, kind of conventional

transgressions, the things that we kind of all know, like, you know, like, shoplifting, we all know, but somehow we remove the stigma from shoplifting. And the criminal charges, yeah. But somehow we reintroduce stigma and shame for, yeah, holding the wrong opinion or for using an outdated term or something like that. And so it does seem like educated and affluent people who, you know, like there's a lot of studies on this that they do wield disproportionate influence on culture, on policy, on public opinion, all of these kinds of things. I mean, they're not like, you know, puppet matter.

They can't, like, completely control it, but they do wield a lot of influence on, like, like, the defund the police thing. Like, there were a lot of police departments that redirected resources and reduced spending on police forces, despite the fact the majority of Americans were not on board with this at all, including the majority of African Americans. But, you know, the elites were all for it for a little while, and suddenly we see this outcome. So they're perfectly willing, though, to introduce shame for law enforcement and all these other things. And I think, like, if we could find a way to get them to understand, and I try to do it

with data, statistics, survey research, and stories, not just my stories, but the people I grew up around that maybe, over time, this can slowly sort of get through to them and get them to understand that, you know, there are, it's important to have standards. And I think there's this sort of mistaken view about holding people up to high standards and expectations that there is this, like, oh, well, if you grew up poor and you grew up in these difficult, chaotic circumstances, Like, you can kind of behave however you want. It's okay because, you know, it's just, you know, you had a hard life. But actually, I think the opposite view is more important that actually when your life is chaotic and disorderly and so on,

it's actually more important for you to be up, you know, to be held to those standards because by, because that helps you to break out of those negative behavioral patterns. And I write about this. I had this experience in the military about, you know, people will say to me like, how, how did you change? And it was like, I spent eight years in the Air Force. I joined when I was 17 when I was still, you know, essentially a child. And I left when I was 25. And those are formative years in any young man's life, regardless of how they spend them.

But if you spend them in a very kind of rigid environment of high expectations, high standards, you know, demanding and kind of exacting expectations, like, of course, like you're going to transform from that experience. And it prevented me from kind of acting out and, you know, behaving impulsively the way that I would have had an opportunity. in that environment. I tell this story in the book about, so my friend Tyler, he went to prison, and I tell this story. So he was sentenced to 18 months. He got out in 12. He was in San Quentin, state prison in California. I visited him shortly after he got out of prison. And we started talking about our experiences because I had been in the military for a little over a year by this point. And so he was like, tell me what the military is like. I said, tell me how prison is like. And we both kind of, you know, we're both like, well, like, you know, every aspect of your life is tightly regulated

and managed, you know, like by the, by the hour, by the minute, everything you do, you know, this is the time you work out, this is the time you make your bed, and this is this, this. And we kind of gradually converged on this point of like, wow, our experiences aren't so different. I'm like, the military is basically prison, at least for the first year or so of training. And the other interesting thing that came out of that conversation was we both agreed that initially we hated it, just like having your life so micromanaged where you had almost no freedom. But then we both also agreed that over time we came to like it. And he told me, he disclosed to me he liked it so much that sometimes he fantasized actually about going back,

that actually this extreme freedom he had wasn't good for him because, you know, unlimited access to alcohol and drugs and he had his car and girls and all this stuff. And he said, sometimes he just missed like being contained in this environment and knowing what each day was going to look like and having that, you know, those patterns. And he actually did end up going back to prison, by the way. But I thought that was interesting that we were both kind of... Some dreams come true. Yeah. We were both kind of like... No, no, no, no. I'm just like, you know, we were both 18, 19 years old by this point. And we both were like, yeah, it sucks, but it's kind of good to have that, those kind of, you know, constraints. At what point are we

just going to be just really honest and go, we're failing our children? Because that's what we're doing. And we can dance around it and we can, you know, use fancy words. and we can put together nice, complex sentences, but let's get down to brass tax, as it were. That's what we're doing. We're failing our kids, and we're failing the next generation, and we're setting them up, we're setting them up to have a life that is ultimately pretty miserable.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's very strange, like where we, you know, we, I guess, meaning like the chattering class, the educated elites, we take this, yeah, this sort of non-concats, judgmental stance, people can live their life, you do you. But again, it's only for things like family. But, you know, so if you see some, you know, if you see like a deadbeat dad or something, it's like, oh, it's their life, leave them alone, whatever. But then if you see someone, you know, using an outdated term for gender or race or what have you, you know, people are very willing to

say like, like, you can't say that. What do you? It's not like, oh, it's you do you. It's your life. No, no, no. They will interfere. That's such a good point. We will criticize somebody for using a term that was perfectly acceptable 10 years ago, but we won't criticize a dad who abandons his three kids and the wife that he had them with. That's such a profound point. Yeah. That's such a good point.

It's, yeah. But I think that there is this gradual recognition. I think it's going to take some time. You know, I had two conversations recently, these two guys who had these private conversations. They read my substack. And they both told me a similar story where they were in their late. 30s. They were married. They had a couple of small kids. And they were telling me like, you know, Rob, I, sometimes I was thinking, you know, like, his marriage really, was it really the right

decision? And they were having these second thoughts. They were having some doubts. And there was no abuse or mistreatment. It was just this kind of malaise, this boredom. The, you know, the relationship wasn't as exciting as it used to be. But then they told me that they had read something I had written. You know, maybe it was something, an excerpt from my book or my substack or an essay. And both of them were like, yeah, we decided to recommit to, uh, to, to, our wives, to our families, and to really sort of not allow, you know, a bit of boredom, a bit of, you know, second thoughts to interfere with this commitment that we made. And I thought to myself, you know, I'm just a guy with a substack. You know, like, imagine if, like, the cultural messaging

in general was this way, if, you know, the op-ed pages of the most prestigious newspapers and magazines and outlets and all of the kind of images that we imbibed, you know, the shows we watch on Netflix, if they kind of reaffirmed this value. you again like if there's abuse or mistreatment and so on obviously you know get out of there but if you know just generally speaking that the default should be you know two parents a kid you know and you know even if even if there is divorce and even if there is single parenthood and so on like that doesn't mean that it should be normalized you know like the two parent family is the ideal and just because we don't always live up to our ideals doesn't mean you discard the ideal it just

You know, it just means like some of us struggle and so on. And we have our private difficulties. But, you know, I think that there's also room to understand that, like, yes, this is probably good for most people. The other point is, like, I think this is maybe more controversial. I think elites should become more comfortable with hypocrisy. You know, like, I mean, they're kind of hypocrites right now, but in the wrong direction. In the wrong way. So I want the old form of hypocrisy.

The old form of hypocrisy was someone like John F. Kennedy, where, you know, he presented the image of being a good husband and a good father and a good family man. He paid lip service to it, but we all kind of know privately. I think even back then, a lot of the kind of elites kind of knew he was philandering and he wasn't, he wasn't the family man he portrayed himself to be, but he still, the elites in general thought it was still important to have that example for the masses. Whereas now, there's kind of two forms. So one is like if a highly educated, an affluent person behaves privately, you know, they live

in a polycule or something like, everyone should do this. And if you don't do it, you're uptight or you're weird or you're, you know, you have issues with jealousy and insecurity. So that's one form. But then the other form is, is the reversal of that where privately they're actually in committed relationships. They kind of live by those conventional or bourgeois lifestyles. But then publicly, they are like, oh, you know, all families are the same. And however you want to live your life, you do you. And, you know, if you want to live in an open marriage, like, maybe that's more exciting. It's not for me. I wouldn't do it, but maybe it's fun for you.

And, you know, I think we should, yeah, the old school hypocrisy is actually, I think, a better model. So basically you want them to virtue signal about different things. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Look, you know what? I think ultimately the point you made about people reading your substack and getting a message is really a very good point to actually think about. And when my son was born, I was posting pictures of him all the time before he kind of got an identifiable face and stuff.

And I talk about being a dad all the time because I think people who are out there and are visible in some way really need to start explaining this stuff in a way that's like, this is actually a good thing to do. And yes, life becomes more challenging as a result. And yes, it's no longer all about you. And that's why you will be way more fulfilled.

Because the moment your life stops being just about you, that's when it gets really good. And people don't get that because they don't see that around them when no one tells them that. And I think you're doing great work on that. I'm so glad this book is absolutely crushing it. If you haven't read it, which is unlikely at this point, because, as I said, not jealous,

but he's been on every fucking podcast in America. So you don't believe in being monogamous. No, no. Yeah, exactly. He cheated on us over in America. Polyamorous podcast. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Not as far as I'm concerned, mate.

Rob, it's been great to have you back. These are really important conversations. I hope loads of people read the book. It's been absolute pleasure talking to you. We're going to ask you a few questions from our local supporters, but for now, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Before Rob answers, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our locals, the links in the description, to see this. How does your upbringing affect your close relationships, and how do you overcome that trauma to have a loving relationship that works? What do you make of, I guess, welfare programs as an approach to dealing with poverty?

What does it feel like to have invented an expression which has gone into the language everywhere? And do you think that everyone using it understands what you meant by it originally? Well, the second question, no. I mean, I think we've covered a lot of ground in this conversation, but I just wanted to reiterate the point about sort of the images and examples that we see. Again, that sort of thought experiment I gave of the kid who has married parents and the images that he sees in popular culture and that sort of balance, whereas kids in sort of working class, you know, poor and poorer neighborhoods, they're not getting it anywhere,

you know, whether in their personal lives or the images that they see. And, you know, as I think about, you know, I think back to my early life when I was, again, watching shows like Fresh Prince or, you know, it's like the sitcoms and the shows of that time, they just seem to be like better examples, more holes. I mean, I think even the, like, the marriage between Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv in that show was like kind of asking. aspirational in a way. Like there was no cheating, no infidel. It was just like, wow, you know, even as a little kid, I'm like, you know, how cool would it be to have parents like that? And now kids aren't really getting that, like nearly, nearly as often. And I think that's

that's something important to think about is just like the vast difference, not only sort of personally, but just also in, in terms of like the images that were exposed to. It's that Mr. Rogers effect, why he's such a beloved figure in America and everyone loves him because he was, you know, that, you know, everyone's dad almost. Yeah, right. Well, we've barely scratched the surface, but like I said, I hope people read the book and, of course, make sure to head on over to locals for the rest of this conversation. Maybe it's too personal.

Did Rob's mom ever get off drugs? Does he have any suggestions to help the drug affected people in life? Or any suggestions to curb the black market of drugs?