Charlie's Last Long-Form Interview: Luxury Beliefs with Rob Henderson
Only a few days before his death, Charlie recorded a long interview with writer Rob Henderson about the idea of "luxury beliefs": Foolish ideas that elites embrace precisely because they are insulated from the consequences of believing them. They talk about Zohran Mamdani as the avatar of luxury beliefs, the "success sequence" that can bring people out of poverty, the "Dark Triad," and more. It's a wide-ranging conversation that touches many of the themes Charlie cared about most in his life. Check out Rob's book "Troubled" at https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Troubled/Rob-Henderson/9781982168537 Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Okay, everybody, very special conversation for you today.
We are here with Rob Henderson.
Rob, great to see you.
Charlie Yarn.
Author of this important book, Troubled, the Memoir of Foster Care Family and Social Class.
I do want to spend time on this, and we will.
You are also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a prolific Substack writer, 75,000 subscribers.
Congratulations.
Thank you, Charlie.
And I want to ask all about that.
And you have a PhD from Cambridge.
That's right.
You know, I've been to Cambridge once.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, yeah.
We had a mostly peaceful debate.
So congratulations on all your success.
Thanks.
I first learned about you.
I was on a long flight from Phoenix to Cincinnati to go campaign for J.D. Vance when he was still a Senate candidate.
This was right before the primary.
And I was, I own, for whatever reason, my podcast app automatically downloaded all the Jordan Peterson conversations.
So I only could, because I couldn't have enough Wi-Fi to download the others.
And I was like, ooh, luxury beliefs.
That's interesting.
And I heard you at Jordan, and I loved it.
And so it's an honor to have you here.
And that's really kind of first, let's take a step back.
Who are you?
Introduce yourself further.
How'd you get into this space of public commentary?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
So first, yeah, it's a real honor to be here, Charlie.
Well, like you said, I acquired a PhD from Cambridge in psychology.
I'm a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Before that, I studied psychology at Yale, but before this, my life was a lot different.
So very briefly, backing up, you described this in my book, Troubled.
I was born into poverty in Los Angeles.
Never knew my father.
My mother and I, we were homeless for a time.
I was eventually put into the foster care system, bounced around different homes all over LA County for a while.
And eventually I was adopted into this working class town in Northern California.
And there was a lot of chaos, disorder, financial catastrophes.
I got this front row seat into a lot of what J.D. Vance talks about.
It feels like an Angelino hillbilly elegy.
It's an Angelino elegy.
Yeah, it's kind of, yeah, like a California version of that.
It sounds like incredibly successful.
Well, thanks.
Yeah.
And so, you know, after experiencing all of that disorder, I had to get out of there as soon as I could.
So I fled, enlisted in the Air Force when I was 17.
And with some hiccups and missteps along the way, eventually I found myself at Yale on the GI Bill and then off to Cambridge on a scholarship.
And throughout that experience, traveling along the class ladder, I was fascinated by these class differences, the differences between the people who I grew up around in the foster homes in LA, this working class town in Northern California, the people I served with in the military.
And then I get to Yale and I'm hearing all kinds of strange, bizarre, newfangled ideas that I'd never heard before expressed with such confidence.
So, I mean, there were two differences there.
One, the unusual beliefs, but then two, the self-assuredness with which they were expressed.
And during that period, I was also reading a lot about the sociology of class, the psychology of status.
And one day, finally in grad school, it came to me: luxury beliefs.
Luxury beliefs have replaced luxury goods in many cases.
And so, what these luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent and the credentialed, while often inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society.
And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief.
And the elite universities are where these beliefs are born, where they're conceived and born, and then they're propagated throughout the media and then throughout the rest of society.
And the people who pass through these institutions wield outsized influence on culture, on policy, on discourse, on the stories and aspirations we have and that we tell ourselves.
And then you see that often the people who promote them are unscathed, unaffected, and then the rest of us have to suffer whatsoever.
So you are the second person now.
I mean, we had Mr. Siberian here yesterday from the Washington Free Beacon, who also was saying the same thing about Yale.
So that's two for two.
Yeah, I knew Aaron at Yale.
Really smart guy.
She went there simultaneously with him?
Yeah, he was a couple years ahead of me.
Really, I read his stuff for luck.
Incredibly smart, thoughtful.
So I really want to spend time on luxury beliefs.
So just the audience, I think this is a game-changing analysis because it really puts a very crisp and sharp marker on what we're living through.
The best of all examples, I think, I want your thoughts, is defund the police.
Oh, yeah.
So defund the police got really big in the summer of 2020, but largely pushed by upper middle class PhDs and college educated, imposed upon the rest of society, but they are immune from, as you say, the consequences or the costs.
This is something that you'd hear at a cocktail party in Kenny Bunkport or in Aspen, where they're like, you know, yeah, defund the police, but they know they will never have to live with what that means.
Can you dive deeper into that?
Yeah, well, it was fascinating to me because I coined the luxury beliefs idea in 2019.
I was procrastinating on a research paper I was working on, and I started tweeting and writing essays and the luxury beliefs idea.
I could have never predicted in a million years that within a matter of months, the elites would be saying defund the police.
That was so far outside.
Luxury beliefs.
I had all these other ideas about what luxury beliefs were.
Defund the police is such a clear and crisp example.
That's a perfect example.
And it was surreal.
All of these institutions lined up to support this.
There was a period where, depending on where you worked, if you posted something online in support of law enforcement, you could lose your job.
That's how crazy things got.
And so I thought, okay, well, I was a PhD student.
I'm studying social science.
Well, what do the surveys say?
What do the data say?
What do actual Americans believe about reducing spending for law enforcement?
And I looked at the data, multiple surveys throughout that period.
If you break down the results by income category, it was always the highest income Americans who were the most in support of defunding the police.
The lowest income Americans were always the least in support of defunding the police.
Same with education.
The higher up you go in education, the more support you saw.
And even when you break down the data by political orientation, white progressives were the most in favor of defunding the police, and black and Hispanic Democrats were less in favor of it.
And so this is a clear example here where the people who live in gated communities, safe neighborhoods, low crime zip codes, they were the ones who were promoting this idea that we don't need police, that we need to hire social workers and violence interrupters.
And then what did you see from the period of 2020 to 2022?
Violent crime rates skyrocketed.
And poor people, low-income people, are always the most affected by crime because they're the ones who live in those low-income areas, those high-crime areas.
And there are far more victims of crime than there are perpetrators.
There's a small number of people who commit most of the crimes.
And most of the people they victimize are people who are in their proximity near them.
other poor people.
And that's why, that's one reason, among others, why they did not support this movement.
And yet you would open the pages of the New York Times, elite media outlets, and they would be writing, publishing op-eds and essays and so on about how we needed to rethink and reimagine law enforcement and policing.
And it wasn't until you started to see public disorder start to affect the upper middle class in some cases when they started to have to hire off-duty police and private security guards.
And they were slowly becoming affected by it that suddenly you started to see a lot of counties and a lot of cities rethink this idea.
And what about the- But they were never affected then.
If they were never affected, I think we would still be seeing those violent crimes.
That is so sick.
So you're saying that the luxury belief model is I truly don't care how the rest of the country lives.
But explain the social aspects.
I mean, you have a PhD in psychology from Cambridge.
So if you were to kind of psychoanalyze, you know, a little pop psychology, someone who is at that cocktail party bragging about, well, I am in favor of defund the police.
What is going on there?
Yeah.
Well, so I'll give you a very sort of potted summary of how luxury beliefs came to signify status increasingly.
So you go back to something like 1899 when Thorsten Vabelin wrote this book called The Theory of the Leisure Class.
So he was an economist and sociologist at the turn of the 20th century.
And Veblen wrote about how the elites of his day would signal status with luxury goods, material possessions.
So, you know, tuxedos, expensive evening gowns, top hats, pocket watches, monocles, servants, butlers, this kind of thing.
Expensive trips.
Exactly.
And attending the lavish events.
And then if you fast forward to the mid-20th century, a sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu wrote a book called Distinction, a social critique of the judgment of taste.
And in that book, he coined this phrase, cultural capital.
And the idea here is that elites, they would convert their economic capital into cultural capital.
So they'd have all this money.
What do they do with the money?
They attend expensive schools and then they learn intricate and arcane knowledge about wine and art and exotic locations to have interesting things to say at cocktail parties.
My claim is that today, the latest expression of cultural capital is luxury beliefs.
So now if you hang around elite circles, increasingly it's about these kind of moral signaling, luxury beliefs, this idea about how we need to reimagine society.
If the conventional view is X, I'm going to take this oppositional view.
I'm going to believe Y. If most Americans want a strong police force, how do I signal my expensive education and my sophisticated views and beliefs?
And the fact that I have the time on my hands to read elite media outlets and that I hang around the right circles and hold the proper views.
Well, you express these luxury beliefs, these interesting ideas and opinions are interesting to you and your circle anyway.
And so this is the latest expression, I think, of cultural capital.
The other thing, the other interesting piece of this is sometimes when I talk about luxury beliefs, people will say, you know, Rob, is it really true that the elites care so much about status?
Or they'll say, well, don't we all care about status?
Why are you picking on the elite so much?
Well, there have been two very interesting studies over the last couple of years which have both came to the same conclusion.
So this is a replicated study conducted twice independently, which found that the higher up you go in terms of socioeconomic status, the stronger people report a desire for wealth and status.
So, people who are at or near the top of educational attainment, income, prestige, you ask them questions like, you know, you show them statements and ask them the extent to which they agree with these statements.
It would please me to be in a position of power over others.
It's important for me that people look at me when I walk into a room.
It's critical that I have influence over my peers.
The higher up you go in socioeconomic status, the more likely people are to agree with those statements.
So they care a lot about status.
It's highly important to them.
And luxury beliefs are one way that they show that.
Yeah, and it manifests in ways like defund the police, but it also goes to people that are bragging about, I have a trans kid.
And like, yeah, you know, that's kind of like a new status marker that if you have a trans kid, all of a sudden you're like in the end crowd, you're very open-minded and I'm progressive and I'm not imposing my gender binary norms upon my kid who I will not call a son or a daughter.
And so this obviously stems from the academy largely.
And it's gotten a lot worse.
I mean, Angelo Cotavilla termed the phrase ruling class.
And so I think it's all these phrases you wrote, you know, you wrote cultural capital, leisure class, ruling class, luxury belief.
What we're really talking about is the quote-unquote elites or the decision makers, which is a small percentage of the American population, but they wield an outsized size of influence.
You and I are not Marxists.
We believe that some people will be elites.
And not only should you have them, you're always going to have them.
It's a fact of the natural law.
Someone is going to ascend with more.
Egalitarianism is not just a bad idea.
It's an impossible idea.
And if you try to do it, it actually creates more inequality.
So the question is, can we get better elites?
Yes.
Isn't that the important question?
Right.
Virtuous ones.
Yeah, that's right.
And yes, I'm not a Marxist.
And what's funny is that even in communist societies, they have elites, right?
Well, of course.
In fact, they have more power than the elites of Western liberal democratic countries.
Yeah, ironically, right?
And so much of, you know, we can talk about that later, but so much of what's driving the Marxists, I think, is a desire for power.
But yes, we want better elites.
And I think that our elites, I wouldn't spend so much time pointing out their shortcomings if I didn't believe they were capable of being better.
And I think that the institutions that train them could probably do a better job of selecting the candidates, to be honest.
But once they pass through these institutions, you hold a large obligation, a responsibility.
You have been given a series of gifts, your intelligence, conscientiousness, your education, your affluence, your parents, your credential.
And I think a lot of people are aware of this and they're just going about this, fulfilling that obligation in the wrong way, where they have this very sort of narrow view of what poverty is, of what struggle is, what strife is.
And they think, well, I want to help poor people.
And I'm not going to spend the time learning about them.
But I see police are sometimes mean to criminals who happen to be poor and therefore let's just defund the police.
It's a very sort of lazy way of thinking.
It's unwilling, this unwillingness to learn about those communities think, well, what will actually help them?
Actually, having policing around is good for them because not all poor people are the same.
Most people do not commit crimes.
The vast majority of them, they work, they want to take care of their families.
They clock in, they clock out, and they don't want to be harassed or robbed or assaulted.
But the thing is, a lot of people who pass through elite institutions have no contact with ordinary working class people.
And so they get this, you know, this warped and distorted view of what that actually means.
And so, yes, our elites could do more to understand the society that they so do you think, as a psychologist, do you think this luxury belief phenomenon is filling a void, a metaphysical one or an existential one?
I just, again, I'm very religious.
I don't know how you say it.
I don't want to impose any beliefs here.
Just, I'm curious that, like, how many people that have luxury beliefs go to church every Sunday?
Probably a low correlation.
You would probably agree with that.
I would imagine very low.
There have been a lot of interesting studies on this of people who are highly educated and report low levels of religiosity, of service attendance.
They're the most actively engaged with politics.
They're more likely to get involved with political organizations and activism and attempt to exert their moral view over other people.
And you see this, I think, a lot with people who are involved, especially with kind of left-wing activism.
This is one reason, among others, why people on the political right are happier than people on the political left.
Is that proven?
Religiosity.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
This has been.
So the reasons are debated, but the fact itself is.
Let's talk more about it because people say they scream at me and say, that's not true, as they're obviously quite happy.
I mean, it's funny because so you get two responses.
One is that's not true, and I'm angry about it.
The other is, oh, ignorance is bliss, like that kind of thing.
Oh, the right thing is that let's explore both.
So, first is what does the data show?
Well, the data show, and this is unambiguous, that people who identify as conservatives or people who identify as the political right, they are happier, regardless of how you measure happiness, whether you measure it through sort of moment-to-moment positive emotions and experiences, or when you ask people about what's sometimes called life satisfaction, stepping back and evaluating your life as a whole, how satisfied are you with your life?
And people on the right also report being more satisfied, higher levels of well-being, regardless of the measure you choose.
And people on the left report being less satisfied.
And people have attempted to explore the mechanisms, what are the causes, and one seems to be religiosity, that people who attend religious services are happier.
There was one interesting study which found that if you attend, so going from not attending any religious service at all to attending at least one religious service per week has the equivalent increase on happiness as going from the bottom income quintile to the top income quintile.
Yeah, which is, I mean, that's.
And this is all, this is an irrefutable detail.
Yeah, this is, yeah, this is irrefutable.
And what's interesting to me is that we spend so much time talking about poverty, income inequality, so on and so forth.
But if you want to raise well-being, well, one might be attend a religious service.
I mean, that's a lot less expensive than trying to redistribute or raising everyone's income by $100,000.
What you're saying is that Zoran Mamdani should be saying everyone should go to St. Patrick's Cathedral, not government-run grocery stores.
I mean, you know, there's data behind it.
Well, it depends on what his goals are.
You know, his explicit avowed goals are.
If he wanted happiness for the city, but now we have other.
I'm going to get into the intentions.
So that's so comforting because we know this to be true.
We kind of see it in our own lived experiences.
So those that are pushing luxury beliefs probably are not super happy, or at least would be just living a joyful life.
I don't think they would have joy.
I don't think anyone that wants to defund the police is a joyful person.
I just, I don't find that.
Maybe you do.
I don't think that's correct.
But so, but the is part of this, though, part of it is this contradiction because they think they're being contrarian to the rest of society, but no one checks them in their place when they say this stuff.
I mean, you go to some of these environments.
Again, you could go to any one of these summer enclaves that I could list, right?
Kenny Bunkport, Aspen, you know, Big Sky, Yellowstone Club, wherever, Jackson Hole.
And they say this stuff at their liberal dinner parties.
And it's just this homogenization, right?
So in some ways, they're not rebelling against anything.
It's actually an act of conformity.
Yes.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Where it depends on sort of the reference group.
So if you're comparing them to society as a whole, they're very Americans.
But to their peers.
Yes.
Yeah, to their peers, they have to.
The contrarian thing would be like, no, I love Trump's takeover of DC.
Right.
That would be a statement to say in Jackson Hole.
Right.
Yeah.
In Tucon County.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's that there are these kind of social contagion effects where, you know, if you spend most of your time with people in the top income decile, similarly credentialed people to yourself, you may view yourself as this intellectual iconoclast or this sophisticated, interesting, creative person.
But actually, if you look at the, you know, the groups that you spend the most time around, chances are there's very little daylight between your beliefs and theirs.
So there actually isn't as much rebellion, I think, as you might expect.
Yeah.
And so are you, do you think that do we need better luxury beliefs?
I mean, oh, no, not no.
Or just get rid of this whole genre altogether, meaning that the bourgeoisie should not have different values than the proletariat.
I mean, I use a Marxist distinction.
Yeah.
Well, I've written about this in different outlets, Substack and elsewhere, and sometimes I think the best thing to do would just be to let the rich buy yachts, buy expensive things, go back to the… Just get out of our way.
Yeah, go back to the Weblin era where you're just like buying name-brand clothes or whatever and leave the rest of us alone kind of thing.
But because they need to buy newspapers, that's the other thing.
The status markers are influence now.
Sports teams, companies, social media companies, right?
That's now the new currency.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so if there are going to be beliefs that elevate your status, I think they should choose beliefs that do not hurt people who are beneath them.
So that's how I define luxury beliefs.
A luxury belief is: does it confer status to the credentialed affluent person?
And does it also inflict costs on less fortunate members of society?
But there can also be beliefs that are good for people and that are disproportionately held by higher income credentialed people as well.
And so I think it would just be worth sort of going through, okay, what are the beliefs?
What are the political views?
What are the policies that I'm promoting?
And first, if they make you look good, great.
And then if they help people, they're not bad because they're held by elites.
Yes.
They're bad because they're bad.
Yes.
And can you elaborate on that?
Because elites can actually hold really good ideas.
Yes, of course.
If an elite is saying, hey, get married, have children, don't commit crimes, that's awesome.
Yes, that would be fantastic.
Just because an elite holds a view inherently does not make it bad.
It just so happens our elites hold terrible views.
That's correct.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so it's bad because it's bad, and it's bad because elites wield disproportionate influence on society.
There's a study from 2014 which found that if you support a political policy and you're in the top income decile, it's twice as likely as average to be enacted and to be implemented into law.
And so yes, they're bad because they're bad.
There are beliefs that are held, you know, concentrated among elites that are good for society and that elites are more likely to hold than the rest.
So something like free market principles, for example, a lot of less educated people, they have difficulty understanding free market economics, for example.
And so if you ask them point blank, they often tend to intuitively, in their gut feeling, hold these kind of semi-socialist views, perhaps because they haven't been educated on how economics works.
And a lot of elites actually do hold more free market principles.
So that would be an example of a good belief that isn't a luxury belief.
Yeah.
And the ones, though, that are just the ones especially that the elite markers have held, the elite, whatever, foreign policy for sure.
And then this crime stuff is out of control.
And the social stuff.
The trans, the BLM, the wokeism.
That stuff is deeply unpopular the lower you go on the income ladder.
And so I think we need to take, we just need to compare things of whether or not they are good or bad.
But the reason you're so effective is that we should hold our elites to a higher standard.
They don't get an excuse.
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
They don't get, and you're uniquely positioned to say this as someone who grew up in a very, you know, as your book says, troubled environment.
You should know better.
Yeah, that's right.
And they, yeah, they should be held to a higher standard.
And they, just because they're increasingly isolated, that doesn't diminish their influence, for better or worse.
And so, you know, if they're going to wield this influence, they have these responsibilities, these duties, these obligations.
And this used to be taken for granted: that if you are a member of the elite, modern aristocracy, the ruling class, however you want to define them, that they should actually try to push policies and laws and ideas that make life better and not worse.
And, you know, you listed some of those woke ideas of transgenderism and other things.
But in my view, and the one that I spend probably the most time talking about in the book is this denigration of the family.
So famously, you know, in 2020 in the BLM website, it was we need to dismantle the Western notion of perfection.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's insane.
And yeah, they took that down later, but that is, you know, you can see it.
It lives forever on the internet.
And that is just the latest manifestation of this.
That idea has been pushed particularly by credentialed leftists for decades that we need to dismantle the family.
And what has happened?
Well, among people who pass through elite institutions, the higher up you go in socioeconomic status, the more intact families are, the least amount of divorce you see, the more importance they place on family and their own personal lives.
But then when you ask them about their views in general about marriage and about family norms, they take this very laissez-faire, relaxed, permissive, like every family's just as good as any other.
We shouldn't say anything about single parents.
We shouldn't say anything about anything.
And yet, you know, you look at how they live.
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Sometimes when I talk about the luxury beliefs class, I say that they walk the 50s and talk the 60s.
Talk more about that.
So if they're walking the 50s.
They're walking a Norman Rockwell painting.
Exactly.
But they're so they talk the 60s.
So they talk like they're at Woodstock.
Yes.
And yet they live like they're in a Norman Rockwell painting.
That's correct.
Yes.
Peace, love.
Don't do that in my home.
So they're like strict administrators of order and discipline in their own life.
Yes.
But outwardly, they have, you know, peace, love, rock and roll.
I don't care if you do weed.
Yeah, just but it can't be my kids and it can't be my neighborhood and not my zip code.
Yes.
But everyone else, you know, have a good time out there.
But isn't there something inherently Doesn't this inherently create the kind of the prerequisites of a political revolution in a bad way, where you have an elite ruling class that imposes something they don't want to live under repeatedly.
I mean, a good one is school choice, right?
They're all against school choice, many of them.
And yet they'll send their kid to a private school or firearms.
You know, they have gated communities and they're against walls.
I mean, you see all of these inherent contradictions.
And for a working person, that creates a lot of resentment.
And that's bad.
We actually don't want resentment.
We want our elites to be respected.
We want people that are at the highest income ladder to be role models and icons and people that we could tell our kids to point towards.
You said something I want to explore.
Two of my favorite words you use back to back, duties and obligation.
I feel as if we never use those words anymore.
Especially when it comes to the rich or the, why is that?
Well, I think because we are at least explicitly, we're attempting to create this egalitarian society.
No one's better than anyone else, you know, attempting to retreat into these non-judgmental attitudes.
But what's interesting is that that kind of approach of don't judge people, let people enjoy things, live your life, you do you, that applies for when it comes to judging people for violating those conventional virtues of family, respect, integrity, punctuality, law-abidingness, all of those things that something like our grandparents would have agreed with.
But when it comes to other things, many credentialed elites are happy to judge you for failing to recycle.
Of course, they're the most judgmental people in society.
Right.
And so they've shifted that energy.
But then if you're pro-life, they're judging you.
I mean, you vote for Trump.
I mean, the people that say do not judge you.
We're a MAGA hat in New York City.
It doesn't go very well.
Yes, yeah.
And so that moral energy, that feeling of, oh, I want to tell the lower orders how to live.
Well, they've abandoned that when it comes to living a good life, a healthy life, a life that leads to flourishing.
They're very hands-off with that.
But then when it comes to, yeah, your political views, using an outdated term for a certain group or for not supporting the latest thing on climate change or whatever, then suddenly the fangs come out and they're happy to condemn you.
The puritanical energy is reignited.
This is a great transition to this phenomenal piece that you wrote this summer, Zoran Mamdani's Luxury Beliefs.
The first line is really amazing.
The luxury belief class, because you've really designated them as a class, has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.
Tell us more.
Well, if you look at the political views of the people who were forming these encampments at places like Yale and Columbia and elsewhere, they held very far-left progressive radical views.
And a lot of people by now, and I'm sure you and many of your listeners have seen the social media posts of Momdani from 2020 and 2021.
What I found funny about the Momdani posts from that era was they weren't just the sort of normal boilerplate woke stuff.
It was a voicer level.
Yeah, it wasn't just defund the police.
It was defund the police as a queer feminist issue.
It was this sort of like over-embellished, toxic, outrageous.
Yeah, it was like things that you wouldn't see anywhere else unless you pass through these institutions where it's not enough to just say defund the police.
It was, you know, it's a queer feminist, all this sort of weird terminology and all the sort of mental gymnastics required to express these bizarre views.
And, you know, Momdani has, it's funny, he sort of walked away, walked back from some of those views, and he's pivoted more towards this sort of overt economic socialism, the sort of communist ideas.
But, you know, those two things are intertwined.
You and many of your listeners, and I'm sure a lot of people have made this point that wokeness is a kind of variant of Marxism.
And so he was a communist.
I mean, he still is, right?
Democratic socialist.
He's a constant.
And he's a Marxist.
And he's, you know, a supporter of wokeness.
And that is the kind of ideology that you see prevailing at elite institutions.
So do you live in New York?
I do.
For now.
What is this?
What is going on here?
You know, I moved there less than a year ago.
And at that point in the polls, Mom Donnie was not, you know, he was treated as an unserious candidate.
And now we're seeing, you know, New York's changed a lot.
You're seeing a lot of people.
What's interesting is that in New York, if you live there in the first place, you already have to be pretty well off, especially if you live in Manhattan.
And the demographics of Manhattan have changed quite a bit where a lot of people who live there, they have bachelor's degrees, they have upper-middle-class jobs.
And like I said before, the people who are educated and people who are well-off, they're the most likely to hold these kind of left-wing luxury beliefs, these radical, newfangled views.
And then they look at someone like Mom Donnie and they kind of see someone like themselves, right?
And there's a lot of kind of malicious envy going on here where they're mad because they're in the top 10% and not in the top 1%.
And they see this kind of, you know, Mom Donnie's, he's kind of a Nepo baby, right?
Like he's kind of this fail son who had well-off parents and he's kind of been floundering in his career for a while and he got this footing in politics where all you have to do is mouth the right slogans and say the right things.
And in a place like New York, yeah, people are willing to support someone like that.
How was he floundering in his career?
Well, did you see what was happening before he was an assemblyman?
This is a lot of local New York stuff.
So nationalize it for us.
Yeah, yeah.
So Mom Donnie, he, well, first, one of your former guests helped to break the news.
You know, remember when Mom Donnie said that he was an African-American?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And when he applied to Columbia and still didn't get in, despite so he claimed to be black slash African American, despite the fact that both of his parents are ethnically Indian.
I know he spent a couple of years in Uganda, but if you and I go to Uganda and then we apply to college, we're not going to mark that we're black, but he tried to do that.
He still didn't get in.
And he went to Bowdoin, which is also an elite institution.
And then he had a floundering career.
He tried to be, he tried to moonlight as a rapper, didn't get very far.
He produced some music for his mother's a rich filmmaker, tried to produce some music for her films to some limited success, but he never really got off the ground in his own career.
And finally, I think in his, I think he was around 30 when he ran for whatever, like a county or city assembly, he finally found something that he wasn't terrible at.
And politics does seem to attract the worst of our society.
Yeah, for better or worse.
That's sadly true.
Is he going to win?
Probably, yes.
If you look at the base rates for, you know, if you're the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, you almost always win.
There are some rare cases where that doesn't happen.
Giuliani, you got Bloomberg.
You know, people have been talking about how, because right now you have Cuomo Adams and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican.
If two of those people drop out and throw their support behind one of them, there's a possibility that they can defeat Mom Donnie.
But if they don't, then he's probably going to win.
And then, yeah, I don't know how much longer I'll be in New York after that.
Does that teach us anything about this whole, because your whole piece on luxury beliefs, does that reinforce your thesis?
Does it show that these luxury beliefs are still held by a big portion of America's largest city?
Or is this kind of just a one-off?
Yeah, it's sad because when I talk to some of my more right-leaning friends, they say, well, maybe he should get elected because then the rest of the country will see that as an example.
That's the best analysis I've ever heard.
But the thing is, the people who vote for him, once his policies are put in place and it actually starts to affect those people who voted him in, a lot of them have means and they can leave.
They're going to go to Connecticut.
The Coleman Young or something in Detroit did this.
I think his name's Young.
The Detroit mayor in the 1960s.
He ran Detroit into the ground just to rule over the ashes.
Everyone left and went to Auburn Hills, but he stayed in power for 20 years.
Right, yeah.
Yeah.
And so it's going to be the people who didn't vote for Mom Dani.
And I point that out in that piece, which is that if you look at the demographic breakdown of the voters, poor and working class voters who Momdani claimed to support, you know, he's talking about rent freezes.
He's talking about, what, raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour.
Those people actually didn't support him in the primaries.
They voted for Cuomo.
They did not vote for Mom Dani.
It was upper middle class people, particularly white progressives who supported Mom Dani.
And a lot of those people, if he gets elected and their life starts to deteriorate, yeah, they're going to flee to Connecticut or Jersey or whatever.
Let's talk about it.
So you have this piece here, Substack.
What I told Bobby Kennedy's team at HHS, you have something called the success sequence, and you got a good way of branding stuff.
I love that.
I'm going to use it.
I got to say that's not mine, but I did write about it.
I think it started from Brad Wilcox.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, no, yeah, yeah.
But I mean, here's the thing.
You grew up in poverty.
So how do we fix poverty in America?
Is it through Mom Dani's, you know, social workers, you know, interventionists, whatever, you know, making the city run grocery stores?
Or how do we address the poverty issue in so many of our great cities?
Well, so the success sequence, there are three simple steps.
So if you want to not live in poverty, you follow these three steps.
And by age 30, there is a 97% chance you will not be in poverty.
And what study is that?
This is from Brookings.
Yeah, you're right.
Yeah, okay.
I'm pretty sure it's out of Brookings.
Brad Wilcox has written about this.
I think it's Isabel Sawhill.
But if you just Google Success Sequence, there's a lot of interesting sociological work on this.
So the three steps, first, graduate from high school.
Second step is get a full-time job.
And the third step is get married before you have children.
It's that simple.
Like those are the three steps.
You follow those steps.
By the time you're 30, you're almost certainly not going to be living in poverty.
And this was the discussion that I had with Robert F. Kennedy's team at HHS.
They were interested in these issues around childhood poverty, how to help people who are living in these circumstances, struggling families.
And this is a very simple thing that I think could be taught to everyone.
there was a survey done a couple of years ago they um asked a representative sample of americans across the political spectrum do you think so they told them here's the success sequence Do you think this should be taught in schools?
And 70% of Democrat parents and Republican parents supported this idea of being taught in school.
So this is like low-hanging fruit.
Most Americans think like, oh, that's like a very simple set of steps.
Let's teach the kids, regardless of their political background.
But when you look at the elites, there's a raging debate.
And you can imagine that Republican elites are like, yeah, like that's obvious.
And Democratic elites are like, no, that's terrible.
We shouldn't shame poor people.
We shouldn't say anything like that.
Cause you're implicitly judging them for how they choose to live their lives.
If you fail to live up to the success sequence, they might feel bad about themselves.
And what I point out in my pieces about the success sequence is it's so simple that you can't really, you can't really help but be able to hold anybody to those standards.
So if the success sequence was something like the only way to not live in poverty is first, you got to get a PhD in mathematics from MIT.
Second is you got to work 100 hours a week.
And third, you got to practice lifelong celibacy.
Then you won't live in poverty.
The correct response to that is, well, that's not fair.
Like no one can live up to those standards.
We shouldn't even be talking about this.
But if the success sequence is what it actually is, we should be talking about it because just about everyone is capable of fulfilling those steps.
You're saying that we don't talk about it because Democrat elites or left-wing whatever progress to be elites, they don't want to come across as preachy or judgy.
Even though that's all they do all day long, they preach us about guns and environment, climate change, racism, but they don't want to preach or be judgy about graduating high school, obtaining full-time employment, and marrying before having kids.
That's right.
I think that's the reason because that's the only group that doesn't want this idea to be propagated and to be taught.
And that's the only group that regulates it.
Even though they don't live those values.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, many of them are the most likely to live those values.
So regardless of your political beliefs, if you went through college and you have a white-collar job and so on, like that, you followed those steps in your own life.
The people around you followed those steps.
And they are not difficult to follow.
And I think that we were talking about this before, what luxury beliefs or what beliefs that could the elites hold that would actually benefit people.
I think just talking about this, these simple steps that, look, many people might fall short of those beliefs.
They may not actually be able to fulfill them.
That doesn't necessarily mean you should discard them or not talk about them.
In the same way, by analogy, elites are generally pretty happy to say that you shouldn't use tobacco, right?
You shouldn't smoke cigarettes.
They're happy to talk about it.
That's a great example.
A lot of people still smoke cigarettes and they fall short of that.
Everyone knows that tobacco is bad for you, but it helps to be taught and to be reminded of this regularly.
And even though people fail to cease tobacco use, elites are still willing to talk about it and say that you should quit.
So I think by analogy, they should be willing to talk about this.
Well, yeah, I mean, they want to run PSAs against racism.
So obviously they're willing to impose their value system on others.
Yes.
They're the ones that push, you know, NFL helmets need to have end racism on it, end racism in the, we need to run these PSAs against hate.
Okay, so that is you imposing a value system on the rest of the population.
Fine.
Okay.
But you don't want to actually promote.
Imagine instead of these ridiculous, like, oh, stop hate commercials.
That does nothing.
Or instead of these like anti-tobacco commercials, what if we ran a billion dollars of ads of do these three things and you won't be in poverty?
Graduate from high school, obtain full-time employment, marry before having kids.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
It's that, yeah.
If you put those three steps up, then yeah, your life will improve.
Even if you follow one of those, your life will incrementally improve, right?
If you graduate from high school, it's better than not graduating.
If you get a full-time job, that's better than being unemployed.
If you get married before you have kids, it's better than having kids out of wedlock.
Sometimes I joke around.
I wrote this other piece called How to Join the Underclass, and I called it the failure formula, which is don't do those steps.
How do you live in poverty?
Don't graduate from high school.
Try to be unemployed.
Yeah, don't work.
Don't seek employment.
We're at full employment.
You can get a job if you want a job right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, a lot of the issues are not poverty related, despite the fact that you're not.
Do you think that poverty is largely a poverty of values?
Yes.
Now it is.
I think decades past, when there was real poverty, kind of the Great Depression era, sort of decades before when our society was less prosperous, poverty was serious.
It was dire.
There was an interesting article in the New Yorker of all places, which found they reported that in the past, poverty meant you went hungry, and today poverty means you get food stamps, you get government assistance.
Like that's the difference.
Or that.
No, this is another luxury belief, which is the wealthier you are, the thinner you are.
I'm sure you've seen that data, which is that if you have a low BMI, you're much more likely to have money.
Yes.
Then the fatter you are, the more likely that you are actually in poverty.
It's the exact opposite, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of things have flipped like this.
And it's funny because the people who are well off and have low BMIs, they're often the most enthusiastic about body positivity, healthy at any size.
And amazing.
And they post that and share that.
And they're the ones doing 72-hour fasts.
Yes, they're playing tennis.
What explains psychologically this contradiction?
We keep on revisiting this theme.
Again, you're the psychologist here.
Explain that to me.
The people that do something themselves and then will not prescribe it for others.
I think I know the answer, but what is yours?
So there's the kind of charitable view, which is that they just don't want to condemn others.
They want to seem permissive.
They want to seem, whatever, progressive, liberal in their attitudes.
The other, I think, more cynical view is that they want to remain lucky.
Well, yes, but they also want to undermine competitors, right?
And so if I'm dark.
Yeah.
If I want to work, I'm watching my diet.
I'm working out every day.
I'm doing all these things for my health, but I'm telling you, like, hey, you know, I haven't got time.
Are they consciously doing that?
No, I think most of them aren't.
Some of them are, but I think most of them are.
So explain, what is that psychological phenomenon?
This is just a sort of a self-deception pattern here where people will hold a set of views.
They don't understand why, but they're beneficial to themselves and to their own lives.
And they can take other people out.
And that's dark, man.
The thing is, so this is a principle of self-deception from evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers.
The basic idea here is that if I want to convince you of something, the best way to do it is if I believe it myself, right?
Like if I know if I'm consciously and deliberately lying to you, you may be able to tell that I'm being deceitful.
But if I believe this myself, then I can also convince you, right?
It comes across as much more sincere.
And this is why I think most of the time, this is not duplicitous.
They've somehow convinced themselves that this is right.
And it just happens to benefit them that they hold the set of views that creates advantages for themselves while undermining other people.
And you can use this for a lot of things, right?
You could apply this to the defund the police idea.
You can apply this to body positivity.
It's a disaster.
The family and marriage stuff.
A lot of this is, you know, whether conscious or unconscious, it's undermining those around them.
No, that's dark that there's some sort of subconscious, I want to say undiagnosed, but mysterious energy force that they want people to stay at their class so they're going to protect.
I mean, is insecurity a good explanation there?
The elites are super insecure because they didn't actually earn it and it's not as meritocratic as they'd like to see, which I actually think is true.
I don't think it's if you spend a lot of time around our nation's elites, they're incredibly unimpressive people.
Yes, yeah.
I think that's part of it.
There's an element of status anxiety there that they either fear slipping down themselves.
And so if they can, you know, if they happen to support a set of views, another one, another luxury belief for you is the elimination of standardized testing requirements for elite universities.
Talk about this one, please.
This is so important.
Well, so a lot of elite universities in the wake of 2020 said, oh, actually standardized testing is racist or it's oppressive.
It's, you know, it's not inclusive.
And so they eliminated this requirement for admission.
And what ended up happening is these institutions received fewer applications from low-income people, from ethnic minorities, from people who, you know, first-generation applicants.
And it actually sort of re-entrenched the kind of class divisions across society where they actually got more applications from essentially rich kids who wanted to apply.
And so I don't think it's a coincidence that who benefited the most from the elimination of standardized testing.
You know, kids from rich families, people who probably are experiencing this insecurity you're describing, the status anxiety.
And standardized, you know, because what happens when you remove that component from the application?
What are you relying on when you're evaluating candidates?
You're relying on things like recommendation letters.
You know, if you're a kid from a rich, well-connected family, you can get a senior.
You can get a senator, a CEO, a famous Hollywood actor, whatever.
And then you're also relying on the essay component.
And the essay component is filled with all of the class-coded language of where you spend your summer and how you're spending your free time and the values that you care about.
You might remember this from 2017.
There was a kid who got into Stanford and you remember that he said one word, one word.
Hashtag Black Lives Matter 100 times in a row.
What school is it?
So he got into Yale and Stanford.
I think he ended up going to Yale, actually.
And that's all he said the entire essay.
I mean, but did Yale ever under criticism for that?
For, well, a little bit, but not that much.
Not as much as you would have expected.
You're reminding of things I'm going to mention on my campus tour.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's worth it.
I mean, that was a good essay, right?
That was the essay.
Black Lives Matter 100 Times in a Row.
Hashtag Black Lives Matter.
And so that was, you know, and so if you are like no poor working class kid, like even if they did support the movement, they would never even think that that's an essay.
That just wouldn't cross their mind.
But if you are plugged in and you're connected, you know, oh, this is going to come across as subversive and interesting and dynamic, and it's going to make me stand out in just the right way.
And lo and behold, he got in.
And so without the standardized test, you're not going to be able to identify talented kids who don't know how to speak in that class context.
I think it's a whole other place you and I could take this conversation where it's like this is just the downfall of objective standards and beauty.
This just reminds me of like Marcel Duchamp and the entire downfall of art.
I mean, if you are even in a place where you can accept an essay, let alone accept that person into the essay.
The essay should not have even been read.
It should have just been like, you're not allowed that, you're not even allowed in our city.
I mean, you're not allowed in Connecticut.
Okay.
Yeah.
But it's just, it's, oh, yeah, I'm going to tape a banana to the wall and I'm like really interesting.
Or here's the messy bed and I'm going to call that art or piss Christ or whatever.
I mean, it just, it plays into this whole theme and I don't quite know how to articulate it over the last hundred years where now a kid gets goes into Yale just by writing Black Lives Matter on the entire essay.
Yes.
Yeah.
That was his submitted essay.
Yep.
Yep.
Okay.
So you have this piece here, the hidden marriage market.
Tell us about it.
Right.
So the point here for the hidden marriage market piece in Substack was that historically, especially for, let's say, the wealthier half of society, there have been arranged marriages, right?
Arranged matchmaking.
You know, the ruling class in centuries past, a lot of it was about consolidating power and that kind of thing.
But then gradually with the rise of the 20th century, the rise of egalitarianism, meritocracy, all these things, at least as ideals, it became, you know, choose your own partner.
You know, families became less and less involved.
But we ended up recreating this assortative matchmaking system through the university system.
And the way that it works, the way that I explain it is, you know, imagine that you are trying to find a romantic partner for your kid and you solicit suitors and you say, okay, well, I want you to submit your IQ scores.
I want you to write an essay about the things you care about and your values.
I want you to send me some recommendation letters and so on.
And you probably see where I'm going with this.
That is what universities do.
Well, it used to be, but yeah, right, right.
They got to marry the Yale kid.
Right.
Well, yeah, yeah.
So what happens is these universities do this where they're screening all of these people for, you know, before the woke era, they were screening them for academic ability, for family connections, for the things they care about, all this class-coded language, and they bring them into these institutions.
And now you're surrounded by people who are roughly the same level of ability, interests, you're all these young people.
And the way that assortive mating works is that the vast majority of people who have bachelor's degrees marry other people with bachelor's degrees or higher.
And this is, you know, this is what's known formally as assortative mating, that people tend to marry people who are similar to themselves.
This birds of a feather flock together idea.
Very rarely do you marry down in class.
Right.
Yeah.
people tend to marry across um and so that is what what i call the hidden marriage market is it's it's higher education where once you pass through the and even if you don't marry a classmate a fellow student um your dating pool changes dramatically once you pass through these institutions and so from that point on you're surrounded by people who work white collar occupations people who are speak your language yeah speak your language exactly and
is this a good thing it's i don't think it's good or bad um it's it's the way that historically things have always been um i don't think that you would ever be able to change this pattern without some kind of authoritarian overreach that people just tend to like being around people similar to themselves it's not just education and income um and class it's also uh one of the strongest um uh similarities between people in a couple is their political values
that people uh like to be with others who share their political orientation and so the the strongest predictors uh tend to be a level of education slash social class and then religiosity and political orientation people like people like themselves why are marriage rates going down it's a good question um they might be going back up last six months i don't know because everything's changing a little bit but last 10 years why are they going down i think there are a couple of different reasons here so a lot of people when they talk about uh the decline of marriage rates they're focusing on
on elites right like people who are uh uh concentrated in metropolitan areas who go to college who and you oh well you know women are going to they're extending their education they're prolonging their time in higher education and they're delaying marriage and delaying fertility actually what you're seeing is um most of the decline in marriage can be accounted for by poor and working class people that's where marriage rates are shockingly low now um why well i think it
comes down to uh to values so if you are in a culture that valorizes marriage and commitment um people are going to get married and if you're in a culture where marriage is just one option among many and the elites in your society will often denigrate marriage or mock it or uh or you know treat it as uh this kind of uh trivial unimportant thing fewer people are going to get married especially people who who rely on public
messaging or are you you on.
on ideas that they hear from elites.
You know, when I talk about my books, sometimes I'll go to campuses and stuff, and I'll do by way of analogy the way that I grew up.
Imagine that you're a kid in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, safe neighborhood, your parents are married, all the adults in your environment are married.
And this is more or less the typical environment for a kid like that.
You're surrounded by married adults, and then you turn on TV, you look at elite magazines, newspapers, glossy periodicals.
And so, in your real life, you're seeing responsible adults who are getting married.
But in pop culture and in a lot of the messaging, you're seeing, oh, casual sex is fun, be promiscuous, have a good time.
Marriage isn't important.
Maybe you should try living in a polycule.
What is that?
It's such like a polyamorous kind of arrangement.
And so you have these two things, right?
But the messaging that you're seeing on the screens and in pop culture is counterbalanced by what you're seeing in your real life.
And so you have real role models and examples.
But now imagine that you're a kid who grew up the way that me and my friends did in an environment where you aren't seeing married adults.
You're seeing a lot of single parents or kids raised by grandparents, kids in foster homes.
And then you turn on the TV, you turn on social media, pop culture, all this kind of elite media, and you're seeing the opposite.
You're seeing casual sex, promiscuity, polyamory, all this stuff.
That's not counterbalanced by anything, right?
Like you're not going to get married if you're not getting that message from anywhere.
And so I think, yes, for the wealthier half of society, some of it does have to do with increasingly prolonged education and people living in these cities and a lot of this sort of ambition and status chasing and that kind of thing.
But I think for the lower half of society where marriage rates have really collapsed, it's due to the lack of values.
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And this is now this other piece we have here.
To raise birth rates, pay people to get married.
What kind of crazy fascist idea is this?
You know, well, is it so crazy, Charlie?
I'm being facetious.
I like it.
So I'm sure you've seen a lot of governments have attempted to raise the birth rate by paying people to have kids, right?
In Hungary, that is the most successful example.
And even then, it's been met with limited success.
So they managed to get a lot of money.
It's a modest uptick, is what I'm told.
Something like 1.6, 1.7, right?
Something like that.
So pre- and post-payment, you know, cash payment transfer to parents, it raised the birth rate something about like 0.3.
So you're getting like an extra third of a kid per couple or something like that.
That's something.
Yeah, it's not nothing.
But I think what's happening is you're kind of throwing out, or you're rather, you're skipping a step here because even in our day and age, despite all the luxury beliefs, despite all of this kind of stuff we're seeing, if you ask most people, you know, do you want to get married before you have kids?
Even today, most people say yes.
They'd like to have a partner to raise their kid with.
And so when you pay people to have kids, well, it's like, well, most people aren't getting married.
And so first you need to get married first, and then you have kids.
And what's interesting is when we look at the fertility decline, there was an interesting analysis published by The Economist last year, which found that what's mostly responsible for the decline in fertility is poor and working class women having fewer children.
So if you look at college-educated women, the decline in fertility is noticeable, but it's very slight compared to 30 years ago.
They are having fewer kids, but it's a very small dip.
But the bulk of the decline in fertility is among poor and working class women.
And that's because, as we were just discussing, marriage rates have declined.
So pay these women, pay these men, get married first.
And then once they're in a partnership, and once you incentivize them to find a partner that they like being around, make it a priority, give them money for it, they're just naturally going to have kids because that's kind of the life course.
Once you find a partner, most people at that point decide to have kids anyway.
But I think the reason for that fertility decline, again, it comes down to values, it comes down to culture.
So you think fertility rates are tied to marriage rates?
Right.
I think the low fertility rates are downstream of the decline in marriage rates.
Yeah, why does everyone skip that step?
You're like the first one I've heard to say that.
Well, again, I think a marriage is unfashionable.
It's unpopular.
It's this, you know, people don't want to feel judgmental and they want to feel, oh, you know, if you've got a theme throughout our conversation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a luxury belief that marriage is just one choice among many.
Yeah, they don't believe that.
Yeah.
They just say it.
So, but why does it matter for us to reverse the fertility crisis?
That's a good question.
And yeah, Elon Musk and others have pointed this out.
It seems self-evident, but why does it matter?
Yeah.
Well, I think there are some people who actually don't care about it.
So what's interesting is.
No, I know I get that question all the time on campus.
They reject the premise.
Well, if you look at the people who are what are known as anti-natalists, people who believe you shouldn't have kids, there was an interesting study a couple of years ago which found that one of the strongest predictors of anti-natalist attitudes is high scores on what are known as the dark triad personality traits.
That's one of the things I want to talk about.
What is that?
So the dark triad, it's an interesting framework from personality psychology.
And it's a constellation of traits, narcissism, which is feelings of entitled self-importance.
Resentment, right?
There's some resentment among narcissists.
No, it's one of the other ones.
I'm trying to remember.
So the second one is psychopathy.
Okay.
And psychopathy is callousness, cynicism, disregard for other people.
And then the third trait for the dark triad is Machiavellianism, which is kind of strategic exploitation and duplicity.
And if you score high on these three traits, you're more likely to believe that it's wrong to have kids.
You're more likely to express this view that people shouldn't have kids.
And sometimes I wonder if this is what's sometimes known as a sort of like a mating interference strategy or a reproductive interference strategy.
So this is from whom.
So this is what this is.
Metaphysically, I have an answer, but you know.
Well, so I'm drawing here from ideas in kind of animal research, evolutionary psychology, and this kind of stuff.
And essentially, it's, you know, if I goes back to our earlier point here, where if I can convince you not to have kids, if I'm a dark triad person, I'm a scheming, manipulative, self-entitled person.
Oh, I know the type.
Yeah, yeah, I've met a few of them too.
If I can convince you not to have kids, then I'm putting myself in a better position for my kids to succeed.
What are the psychological markers of someone that has a dark triad?
How do you quickly diagnose that?
So it's not necessarily a clinically diagnosable person.
How do I notice it, recognize it?
Because I think it's helpful.
People should know that in their work, in their community.
Yeah, there are it's hard to accurately sort of sort of diagnose at a glance whether someone is dark tribe.
But once you get to speak with someone, get to know them, if you speak with someone who regularly turns the conversation around back to themselves, kind of one-uppers, you tell an interesting story, let me tell you something about what happened to me today, and then I come back with, oh, that's nothing.
Like, let me tell you about what happened to me.
That's a marker of something like narcissism.
Great point.
If you see someone who is what's called known as itinerant, so very frequently relocates in their lives, that can also be a sign of psychopathy because this is someone who regularly burns bridges, whether with their employer, with their friends, with their romantic partners.
So when people have a pattern of anyone being close to them and it's bad, that's a bad sign.
Right.
And then another, and this is more characteristic of Machiavellianism, is if you ask other people about them and you get a wide variety of different views.
So, you know, if I ask you, hey, what's the deal with this guy?
You give me one opinion.
I ask someone else, what's the deal with this guy?
They give me a completely different perception.
Then what that tells me is this person is kind of a snake, a shapeshifter, someone who behaves differently in different contexts.
And so that can be important as well.
It's not just, let me look at this person and try to evaluate them.
Let me ask around.
And this is why referrals and recommendations and that kind of thing.
And so back to the birth rate, you're saying that the dark triad is an interference project.
That's what I suspect is if you are high on these traits, if you're kind of a manipulative person, you're going to promote antinatalism as an idea in part because you want to reduce other people's fertility, reduce the competition.
The other thing is people who are high on the dark triad tend to be unhappy people in general.
And I think they just want to kind of.
What percentage of the population is high in the dark triad?
So it varies.
It depends on how you sort of cut it, where's the cutoff here, but something like 5% are high on this.
That's a lot.
Yeah.
And then perhaps another 5% sort of right beneath them who are not sort of overtly manipulative or scary in some way, but they're sort of.
What percentage of prisoners are dark triad people?
So that one I don't know, but I do know that when you just measure psychopathy, that is the lack of empathy or lack of compassion.
Callousness, cruel disregard for others.
It's sometimes known as the darkest of the dark triad of the high correlation of prison populations.
So something like 40% of prison inmates would qualify as clinical psychopaths, right?
And so you see the most concentration of psychopaths in prison.
But what's interesting is that you also find large numbers of psychopaths in sort of corporate boardrooms, probably yes, high-ranking politicians, something like 12% to 15% of the people who are at or near the top of their game in terms of business, corporations, politics, around 12 to 15%.
And then among college students, it's something like 8 to 10% of college students would qualify for a psychopathy diagnosis.
Well, I've met a lot of them.
And so just as a reference point, something like 1 to 2% of the population would qualify as a clinically diagnosable psychopath.
So it's 1 to 2% of the general population, something like 10% on college campuses, 12% to 15% among high achievers, and then something like 30% to 40% in prisons.
And so how does that then play itself out in society?
And what are the checks we have on psychopathic people?
Well, so one is basically being able to screen for people who are being purposefully manipulative to extract some gain.
So there was a study a couple of years ago on what's called victim signaling, which is essentially this paper found that people who are high on the dark triad traits are more likely to signal victimhood in order to obtain advantages for themselves.
And so people who are high on these traits are more likely to say, you know, I'm not.
I'm under attack.
Yeah, yeah, I'm under attack.
They like to broadcast how they're being mistreated and beleaguered and so on.
And I think it is important here to note that it's not that victims have high dark triads.
Actual victims.
No, no, no, that's right.
Yeah, that's right.
Rather, it's people who are high on the dark triad disguise themselves as victims in order to exploit your sympathy, your compassion, your empathy.
That, you know, oh, I know you're a good person.
And, well, because I know you're a good person, I'm going to try to position myself in a way to elicit your sympathy and talk about how bad I've had it and so on.
And historically, we've found ways to screen for that where we have kind of high standards for, okay, well, you've been mistreated.
Well, explain it.
You know, we're able to challenge you on it a little bit just to make sure before we devote attention and time and resources to you, like, let's actually evaluate.
We don't do anything more because we can't judge.
Everyone's a victim and we're not allowed to challenge it in any way, right?
And of course, like dark triad people pick up on this and they're like, oh, well, how do I, yeah, they arrive at a new environment and say, well, what can I do to obtain advantages for myself?
Oh, well, I'll just pretend like I'm a victim and so there you have it.
So what you're pinpointing is that the modern so smart.
I've never heard anybody say this and I listen and read a lot of stuff.
What you're saying, though, is that this modern sensitivity movement, last 20, 30 years, can't judge, you know, can't make people feel bad, is a fertile playground for psychopaths.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you written this down?
Yeah, I have.
I'll send it to you.
No, that's really good.
It's exploiting.
Because I deal with psychopaths way too often because it's in my world of power, intrigue, politics, and media.
Yeah.
Well, they're also narcissists.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, and people who tend to be interested in these, it disproportionately attracts those types of people.
If there's a camera, there's a narcissist.
Yeah, I mean, well, I wouldn't go that way, but I would say that if there's a camera, you're more likely to attract.
No, that's what I'm saying.
Not everyone on camera is a narcissist.
But talk more about that.
So the check used to be our capacity to ask questions, pursue inquiry, and kind of push back and de-emphasize.
But now we can't do that because the modern morality is thou shall not judge under any circumstances.
You're automatically a victim, period.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And therefore now you get the rise of the psychopaths.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, they're able to exploit other people's sympathy.
If you have, this is kind of a game, you could look at it through a game theory lens where if everyone is cooperating, things can work pretty well.
But as soon as you have someone who's a defector, an exploiter, they can take advantage of all of the cooperators and they can quickly rise to the top because no one's challenging them, no one's checking them.
And I think we're seeing a lot of that.
But what's interesting is that people who are high on the dark triad, they tend to be short-term effective, long-term ineffective because they can.
That's why they have to bounce around.
Yes, that's why they move a lot.
And it's difficult for them to build durable coalitions, to acquire trust from people.
If you want to build something that lasts and hold on to power, not just momentarily, but for a prolonged period of time, people have to trust you.
And narcissistic psychopaths.
If you were up against a dark triad person, what else is their Achilles heel?
I mean, generally, I would recommend trying to avoid them.
But yeah, each person is different, right?
Like they're different just like anyone who isn't high on the triad.
What you're saying is like, I'm just blown away by the specificity.
Yeah.
I mean, it's useful to ask them, you know, to challenge them because a lot of them, just like other people, but perhaps even more so for narcissistic types, is they have a very sort of surface level knowledge of whatever they're talking about.
They know just enough to sound impressive.
And then, once you start challenging them and questioning them and so on, you'll see that oftentimes they will start to fall apart.
And then they'll start to resort to these kinds of manipulative tactics of, you know, what is it, like sort of reorienting and interrogating you instead of calling you all kinds of names, accusing you of whatever ism of the day and that kind of thing.
And I think that oftentimes you can kind of declare victory at that point where once you've stepped outside of the argument and started lobbying names, then you know that.
And wokeism is just like the perfect launching off point for the dark triad.
Yeah.
Because you can't have any dialogue or discourse.
It's all about victim sensitivity and oppression hierarchy.
And so you can't really navigate it.
So there's no way for us to keep the psychopaths in their corner.
Instead, they're able to grow and flourish, especially if they are of a victim group criteria.
Right.
And yeah, and this, yeah, it's a catastrophic ideology for that reason, where you start to put people who are unqualified into positions of power because we can't stop them because you're a racist.
So if you have like a black female psychopath who's competing against you and is lying and is narcissistic and is Machiavellian, if you report her to HR, you could get in trouble for being a racist.
Yes.
And then she would use, or I don't mean to pick on black women, whatever BIPOC thing.
They could use the HR department as a means towards their ascension.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And they tend to be good at that, of sort of identifying weak spots and learning how to disguise themselves in just the right way.
And yeah, we used to have sort of checks on this: it's good to have compassion for people who are genuinely victims and try to give them a leg up whenever you can.
But in order to ensure that that doesn't get exploited, you have to be able to question people, to interrogate them, to make sure that their claims to victimhood are valid.
And often what you find is that people who claim to be victims are the least likely to actually be victimized or the most able to accentuate whatever qualities they share with actual victims.
And so you saw this with a lot of the elite college admissions policies, right?
They kind of valorize victimhood and this kind of thing.
And if you want to get in, then you have to talk about how you've been oppressed in some way.
But ironically, the people who are the best at speaking the language of oppression are the ones who have been the least oppressed because if you've actually been oppressed, you don't know the class-coded language.
Well, that's a phenomenal segue to our last thing, which is your book.
Oh, sure.
So you've lived a tough life, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class.
You didn't quite know how to explain it in elite parlance, right?
Right.
Tell us about your story.
I mean, you're incredibly accomplished.
You have this great book, Troubled.
Please.
Yeah, well, I open the preface of Troubled by introducing myself to the reader by my three names.
So my full name is Robert Kim Henderson.
My first name, Robert, comes from my biological father, whom I've never met.
And the only reason I have isn't to this day, right?
Yeah.
The only reason I have his name, not really, if I'm going to be honest.
You know, I got his name from.
It's a tough question, so I'm sorry.
Yeah, well, no, it's not.
It's just, I've thought about that, and I kind of go back and forth.
I'm kind of ambivalent on it.
But my middle name, Kim, comes from my biological mother.
So she came to the U.S. from Seoul, from South Korea as a young woman.
And her life quickly unraveled.
And I talk a little bit about it in the book, got swept up in drugs and a lot of the kind of stuff that's going on.
I know her.
Very briefly, I have a couple of early memories which I describe in the book.
She was strung out.
That's when I was taken by social workers and placed into the LA County foster system, bounced around different homes.
And then this is where my last name comes from, Henderson, which comes from my adoptive family.
And this was the late 90s.
My adoptive family, we settled in this dusty blue-collar town called Red Bluff in California.
Very working-class town.
I checked the stats for my county.
It's one of the poorest counties in California.
And in the 2024 election, it went 70% for Trump.
Wow.
Very Republican.
It's a part of California people do not really know about.
It's way, way north.
It's known as the state of Jefferson.
It's more libertarian, but in terms of voting patterns, Republican.
And most of the adults didn't have college degrees.
There was a lot of squalor.
The opioid crisis was just kicking off.
A lot of meth.
My adoptive parents divorced.
There was a lot of drama.
My adoptive parents divorced.
My adoptive parents divorced.
Yeah.
And do you have any siblings?
So they had a biological daughter who's my adoptive sister.
Was that a good relationship?
It was good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, you know, she and I are, we remain close.
Praise God for that.
Yeah.
She was a good, good influence for me.
And then later, when I was writing the book, I decided to take a genetic ancestry test because I'd never known anything about my father, but I thought, oh, maybe it'll be interesting for the book.
And I discovered that I'm half Hispanic on my father's side.
So my father was Mexican.
And I remember when I got those results, my first thought was, I wish I'd known that when I was applying to college.
Yeah.
I mean, if you went to Yale and Cambridge, you did just fine.
But before you get the letters, you never know, right?
You want all the women.
And you would have been able to check the Hispanic box.
Yeah.
Unstoppable.
I mean, you would have been president of the university.
Yeah, maybe.
You would have the Hispanic Asian foster care thing going.
I know, I know.
But yeah, and so I document not just my life in the book, but some of my friends as well that I grew up around in this very, very tough, poor, impoverished, lot of crime, a lot of violence, a lot of drugs, and how their lives, when I had five close friends growing up in high school, two friends went to prison.
I had another friend who was shot to death.
Other friends kind of working menial blue-collar jobs.
And they're struggling.
I go back every couple of years to visit.
And I thought it was important to tell their stories as well.
So what drove you when you were like 14?
Because that's a decision-making time.
14.
Well, 14, 15.
I'm sure you talk about this in the book.
Yeah.
And how did you end up at Yale?
Well, so when I was 14, God, you know, there's so much in the book, but I'll just my I mentioned my adoptive parents divorced and my adoptive father stopped speaking with me.
So I was raised for a period with my adoptive mother.
She's a single mom, and she ended up in a relationship with a woman named Shelly in the book.
California.
Yeah, right.
Actually, yeah.
And so then they raised me for a period of my childhood.
Raised by lesbians, too.
Not for the whole, but yes.
You've really run the gauntlet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I am impressed.
Yeah, can't make that up.
No, you can't make that up, right?
Foster parents from Korea and Mexico raised by lesbians.
It's impressive.
Well, this next part, so when I was 14, right before high school, so my mom and Shelly were together at this time, and Shelly was shot.
And so what was driving me at that point was some combination of rage and disappointment and hurt.
And there was a lot going on.
Who were you angry at?
It was kind of a diffuse, like I think it was accumulated anger from not ever knowing my father, all the foster homes, all of the, you know, I have the line in the book where I say, if you, if a kid is let down by the adults in his life, eventually he learns to let himself down.
And that's what I was feeling.
Just this massive disappointment, let down, and it got channeled as rage, acting out.
And this is one reason, among others, why I didn't go straight to college after high school, because I was so unfocused.
I graduated with a 2.2 GPA.
How did you get to Yale then?
So I enlisted.
So I was 17, enlisted in the Air Force.
That must have been great for you.
It was.
Yeah.
It was, you know, that was, to this day, probably the best decision I ever made.
Because that gave you order and discipline, direction, purpose.
And the whole, you know, so much of the book, that's a theme that runs through is the importance of order.
You know, I mentioned one of my friends went to prison.
After he got out, I met up with him.
We were both 19, 20 years old.
And we were comparing notes.
He's like, you know, what was basic training like?
What's the military like?
What's this?
And I'm like, you know, what's prison like?
What was that?
And we both kind of came to this same conclusion where it kind of sucks, but we also liked it.
He was telling me he liked prison because he knew you get up at this time, you go to roll call, you do need order.
Yeah.
And he was like, I kind of missed that.
And I was thinking to myself, yeah, like in the moment it sucks.
But then as you go on, you're like, oh, this is what I need.
I need to know what my day is going to look like, what my week's going to look like, what's expected of me, what my goals are, and how to use this time productively.
And so from that point, I started going to night classes at a community college, finally took the SAT, which I never did in high school.
And then, you know, to their credit, Yale ended up admitting me.
And this was 2015.
So it was right at the moment that the university started to go crazy.
So I got a front receipt to that.
And then when did you do your doctorate in psychology?
So I went off to Cambridge in 2018.
And one reason, Charlie, why I went to Cambridge is because I thought, because I was witnessing all the craziness.
You thought Cambridge must be, I mean, come on, it's Cambridge.
Yeah, I was like, oh, like, it's in England.
I had this image in my mind of like these like these dons in the white robes or black robes rather, just like disconnected from the culture war.
They're reading like very monastic.
Yeah, yeah, like with sort of sort of oak wood paneling and old libraries and just no, that's not what Cambridge is like.
So I get there within, I think, six months.
So Jordan Peterson was supposed to be a guest research fellow at the University of Cambridge.
So this is 2019.
I remember this.
He's disinvited.
He's like Queens or something or Kings or one of their colleges.
Yeah, it was one of the colleges.
There's one of the colleges.
In the Divinity School, but I don't remember which college.
Yeah, I could be misremembering, but yeah.
But yeah, he, and he was disinvited.
And I'm like, oh, this same stuff is happening here, too.
And I saw lower level examples.
That was the most sort of salient, sort of media example, but there were lower-level cases.
I had friends who were fired, friends pressured to resign, all this crazy stuff happening.
And I thought I wanted to be a professor.
And then I see all of this stuff happening.
And I'm like, I can't, I can't be in academia.
I'm seeing too much of this.
And then I started to write full-time.
I worked on this book.
I started a sub stack and kind of pivoted out of academia and more towards sort of commentary and writing for the general public.
And yeah, it was just a shame.
I had this image of what college was, mostly mistaken, also kind of a class thing because I based my perception of college on TV and movies.
I'm like, oh, you go there, you read books, maybe you go to a party, you have a good time, you read, you study, you come out better.
And then I get there and it's just demonstrations and mad activism and anger.
And I got there, you know, again, 2015, I saw all the blow-ups during that year.
And then 2016, Trump gets elected.
People go to another level of craziness.
And I go off to England, same thing.
And I'm like, nope, I can't.
I can't do this.
Good for you.
What an amazing success story.
The book is called Troubled, A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.
