Pod Insights Summation with Auren Hoffman Rob Henderson - Luxury Beliefs: How Elites Exploit the Poor About this episode Rob Henderson is a developmental psychologist, author of the New York Times bestseller Troubled and columnist for the Free Press and the Boston Globe. In this episode of World of DaaS, Rob and Auren discuss: How elites exploit the poor with luxury beliefsThe vital importance of marriage for upward mobilityThe conspiracy behind useless college degreesThe “late bloomers” phenomenon Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and ev...
Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Hello, fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Rob Henderson. Rob is the author of the bestselling book Troubled, which was the best book I read in 2024. He's currently a columnist for The Free Press and also The Boston Globe. Rob, welcome to World of DAS. Hey, Orin. Thank you. It's great to be here. Really excited. Now, there's this Marc Andreessen quote that says, CEOs are not actually
0:45 Speaker 00 concerned with profit. They're concerned with being seen as good people. Unpack that. What does that say about status in the tech world? I think that a lot of people have this misconception that money is the prime mover of the world. We have these phrases, money is the root of all evil, money makes the world go around, follow the money. And often, that's like a pretty good heuristic often to use. Profit is a motive for a lot of people, financial profit and incentives. But that Andreessen quote, I think, highlights something that I've been concentrating on for a long time, which is also the importance of social status, of the esteem in which we're held by the people whose opinions we respect. So often, people will take a pay cut for that.
1:30 Speaker 00 In some ways, that is why people make money in general. You don't make money for money. You often make money to convert it into status. That's exactly right. I think a lot of people, they care more about what other people think about them than the number on their bank account. There was a really interesting study a couple of years ago, which found that sociometric status is a stronger predictor of well-being than socioeconomic status. Sociometric status in particular is essentially respect and admiration from your peers. People who are well-liked and admired by the people around them, by their social circle, are happier than people who make lots of money. That's what that Andreessen quote captures. When we talk about elites, how do we define that? Like, what is an elite? That's a thorny question.
2:14 Speaker 00 And are there more elites today than there were in the past, or there are fewer? Well, it's interesting. Peter Churchill, his idea of intra-elite conflict and how that cultivates political instability. I mean, he says that there are more elites now cyclically throughout history. Whenever there are too many elites or elite aspirants, this can give rise to instability in societies. And he points out that if you define elite by, say, the number of people who earn at least $10 million a year or something like that, then there are more elites now. He's adjusting for inflation, of course, but he points out that if you compare the 1980s to today, there are more millionaires in America than there have ever been. But one thing that I try to point out in my book and in some of my writings is that there's more to class than money alone.
2:59 Speaker 00 There's a really great book that came out decades ago by this author, Paul Fussell, called Class: A Guy Through the American Status System. And he points out that really there are three particular ingredients of class. Obviously, there's money. You have to have a certain amount of wealth to sort of rise and achieve upward mobility or to be accepted in higher social circles. Money alone isn't enough because if you win the lottery, it's not as if, oh, now you're the elite. They're Beverly Hillbillies back in the day. Yeah, yeah. Overnight, you don't join the elites. And then the second component is education. Did you receive an education at certain exclusive institutions? And then finally, the third ingredient is cultural capital or habitus.
3:44 Speaker 00 Your tastes, your opinions, how refined and cultivated your manners are. Do you fit in with this group? Those are the three ingredients. But is 100% of people who go to Yale in the elite, or is it 20%? One way that sociologists measure social class is not your particular level of education as an individual, but your parents' level of education. Your parents' level of education is a stronger predictor of your political views and how you think about the world and your tastes and your habits and your interests, more than your own level of education. Ivy League institutions, something like 80% of the students there are continuing generation students, meaning they had at least one parent who graduated from college. And they've made efforts. I mean, 20% of the students now are first-generation students at a lot of these institutions.
4:29 Speaker 00 So I think under that classic definition of social class, though, that 20%, they are not members of the elite. Their children might be. When I have kids, maybe someday they'll join the American elite. They might not be when they graduate, but 10, 20 years after, there's a high likelihood they'll join the elite. Again, it depends on how you define elite because, you know, there are always these fuzzy boundaries with social categories. But the thing is, so even if you track those students, those first generation students who went to Yale and compare them with continuing generation students who went to Yale and you track them over the course of their careers. Those first generation students will always lag slightly behind in terms of their income, their earnings, occupational prestige, how quickly they get promoted.
5:08 Speaker 00 Simply because they aren't as well equipped with all of the knowledge and all of the kind of exclusive access to information and the right social circles. I mean, I had friends who were first generation students at Yale who, for example, really wanted to get a finance internship. They wanted to work at JP Morgan or one of these places, but they didn't know when the deadlines were to apply and who to ask for and how to prepare for interviews. On paper, their resumes looked the same as their peers, but they just didn't have the requisite information to rise in those kinds of organizations the way that peers did. Remember that varsity blues scandal where people were paying to get their kids? Let's say their kid was getting into like the number 30 school and then they would pay a hundred million dollars or 20 million dollars, something like that, or five million dollars
5:52 Speaker 00 to get them to go from the number 30 school to the number 20 school. These are people already in the elite. If they could afford that much money, their kids are already going to be fine. Like they're already going to at least the number 30 school. Plus their parents all had over a hundred million dollars. You can't cry for these kids. Why are they breaking the law and doing all these crazy things just to go up like 10 spots on the US News and World Report ranking? Well, I think it goes to your point earlier about how people will pay money in exchange for status. As you were saying before, the status conferred about your parents. I think for so many parents, the status is almost conferred about how good their kid is. Doing it like goes the other way. Well, I think that's what it is where because a lot of these Hollywood stars, they may be treated as Hollywood royalty.
6:35 Speaker 00 But you know, if they wanted to get their kids onto a certain kind of ladder among the ruling class or something, then it helps to go to an elite university. And so they were willing to shell out all this money. These weren't just Hollywood. A lot of those people, varsity blues were like the number two or three guy at TPG, which is one of the biggest private equity funds. They're like serious people who are doing this thing. Yeah, well, I remember there was a friend of mine, he's a college professor and he posted on Twitter. So he went to Yale and he was thinking, okay, am I going to pay money to send my daughter to Yale? And he was doing the math. Well, I'm paying X amount for tuition, X amount for living stipend, this, that, and the other to get her there. Or I could put this into some kind of trust and when she's whatever 35, she'll have some X number millions of dollars.
7:17 Speaker 00 So is it worth it to pay half a million to send her to Yale now or wait 15 years and she'll have several million dollars without the degree? And the comments were like, oh, but there are all these intangible benefits to going to a place like Yale, the circles, the privilege, the access, the career ladders you're able to climb. Basically opens up all these doors for you that money alone can't open. That's probably going on a lot of people's minds when they're willing to literally break the law to send their kids to these institutions. Paying professional test takers to take the SAT for their kids and that kind of thing. That was a crazy scandal. You originated the term luxury beliefs. For our listeners who don't know what that is, can you just quickly summarize it?
7:54 Speaker 00 I coined this term luxury beliefs, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent 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 beliefs. And there are different kinds of sociological frameworks that I introduced to explain the idea. But you can trace it back to 1899, this book, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorsten Babbelin. And Babbelin, who was an economist, he pointed out that, you know, in his day, elites would exhibit their status with luxury goods. Expensive and delicate and restrictive clothing, tuxedos and evening gowns and those kinds of things, top hats and pocket watches. And then if you fast forward to the mid 20th century,
8:40 Speaker 00 Pierre Bourdieu and other sociologists pointed out that elites would often convert their economic capital into cultural capital, which is kind of what you and I have been discussing, where wealthy people would take their money and then convert it into access to exclusive educational institutions and social circles, learning intricate and arcane knowledge about wine and art and exotic locations. And basically expressing this knowledge meant that you were raised in an upper-class family and that you had access to the right kinds of institutions and social circles and whatever. But if you fast forward to the present, my claim is that luxury beliefs are the latest expression of cultural capital. And there are specific examples we can get into, but in example after example of a luxury belief, I dig up survey data and statistics and so on,
9:24 Speaker 00 where you find that often the highest-income Americans are most likely to espouse certain beliefs and opinions and support certain movements, while ordinary Americans and lower-income Americans are the least in favor of these kinds of luxury beliefs, in part because they are the ones who are going to be the most likely to bear the brunt when those beliefs are implemented into policy or into culture. You had a couple of examples, like defund the police, or not promoting marriage, or other types of things like that. And most of those beliefs would be, let's say, somebody on the left more likely believing them, the rich person on the left. Are there luxury beliefs that are more on the right?
10:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think there are. When I left the military when I was 25 and I stepped foot on the campus of Yale in 2015, at that time, there was this strange reconfiguration of our politics where a lot of people are familiar with the fact that in 2012, wealthy people generally tilted toward Romney over Obama. But then, over the last decade or so, there's been this shift in our politics where more and more high-income people are voting for Democrats, whereas more working-class people are tilting toward the Republican side. And so by the time I had access to elite institutions, I saw this reconfiguration. So it's possible that had I entered Yale 15 or 20 years ago, my examples of luxury beliefs would be very different. But it just so happens that a lot of the beliefs tend to be more left-coded. I suppose you mentioned defund the police, this belief that it's not important for
10:47 Speaker 00 Children to be raised by two married parents. And there are, I think, even now, these more right-coded, conservative, luxury beliefs. Trickle-down economics would be one example. This belief that if you just let very high-income people keep all of their money, that somehow those benefits will redound to the benefit of other people. I think generally, people who work in tech tilt Democrat, but we're seeing more and more of them support the Republican side. And the view that you can profit from selling lots of addictive technology to the masses, but then privately exercise very careful control over how you and your family use screens and devices and digital technology at home. Tech has gone through at least some sort of ideological vibe shift. Even just like a decade ago, I think Peter Thiel and David Sacks,
11:32 Speaker 00 which are both previous World Desk guests, they apologized for writing The Diversity Myth, which they wrote when they were in college. And then more recently, they've apologized for apologizing. How can you break down this transition? I think people are likely to respond to political and ideological shifts with time. I mean, we saw this with Zuckerberg. After the 2016 election, Zuckerberg apologized for his policies and how he was handling Facebook and promised to identify misinformation and fake news and so on. And then more recently, he's been more favorable to Donald Trump in 2024. And now he's shifting his attention away from misinformation and adopting a community notes approach that Elon Musk took with X. Economic elites often will respond to the political moment
12:16 Speaker 00 in order to form stronger alliances with whoever has power among the political elites. That's kind of what's happening now, where now that we have a new administration and there's a vibe shift, it may be wise to not piss off the existing administration too much. Especially because I think the general belief and the general feeling, I think, of Trump the second time around is very different than the first time. I think the first time, it was seen as a fluke and that we're just going to get through these four years. And that was a blip in history and we'll get back on track. But now that he's been re-elected, I think people recognize that this is a political movement that has some staying power. And it may be wise to not support these politically correct woke movements as much anymore. A lot of people say, like, wokeness has peaked. Has luxury beliefs peaked?
13:00 Speaker 00 I think wokeness generally has peaked. I don't think it's peaked in academia. I have friends who are still academics. They tell me horror stories. It's as bad as ever. But generally, in the culture, I think it's peaked. Why do you think it's peaked in society, but it hasn't? Trickle down to academia. Academia just attracts a very certain type of person. They're driven, I think, often by ideology. Unlike journalism, you probably saw recently, like Jeff Bezos announced the opinion pages of the Washington Post are going to shift to a more pro-liberty, pro-free-market stance. And even journalism, which attracts a similar type of personality to academia, there's still a bottom line with journalism. You either have subscribers and you're making a profit or you aren't. Whereas in academia, there's no concern with profit.
13:42 Speaker 00 It's built on reputation. It's built on these citation rings. It's built on, do you get invited to the right conferences? Do you get your papers published in the right places? And it's very different there. And people are just as vehement and ideologically driven as ever. But I don't think luxury beliefs have peaked. I think maybe the specific examples may change over time. Like defund the police, for example, that peaked maybe four, four and a half years ago. It was more of a fad belief. I compare the luxury beliefs idea, I draw this parallel to fashion, where the idea of fashion will always be with us. What's fashionable? What's trendy? What's in style? That will be with us, but the specific clothing will change from season to season and year to year.
14:22 Speaker 00 It almost has to be for luxury beliefs because if it gets too popular, then you can't signal your class anymore. And so you have to move on to something else. Wokeness itself, you can trace that as a kind of luxury belief where I remember the mid 2010s on elite college campuses, where the word woke was considered cool. People would say like, stay woke. This is a cool term. We're all in this clique. Let's stay woke. And then fast forward five, six, seven years later, and you have Sean Hannity on Fox News railing against the woke. It's like, oh, that term isn't cool anymore. Now the boomers know about it. Now the uncool people are talking about wokeness. Then the line became wokeness doesn't exist, or what's woke, or I don't even know what you're talking about. And they move on to something else.
15:03 Speaker 00 Three of my favorite books are your book Troubled, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, and the other Westmore by Westmore. And they all tell almost a very similar story of someone kind of picking themselves up and learning over time and overcoming obstacles. It's almost like a truly American story. Resonate so much in America. We have this Horatio Alger, rags to riches, great gaspy mythology. I just wrote this essay about E. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it'll be in the Free Press soon. We have this longing for those kinds of stories in fiction and in nonfiction of someone who starts from humble beginnings and just through a lot of effort and if you're fortunate enough to be blessed with some talent
15:46 Speaker 00 and a lot of luck and assistance along the way that we can achieve something and become greater than what we were. The American dream is maybe you yourself can improve your life circumstances, or if you work really hard, your children can do better than you. And one thing I've noticed with readers of my book, a lot of the older readers who had similar circumstances to me, but they didn't have that upward trajectory. Their lives started out not so great and never really got better, but they're doing everything they can to help their own kids to achieve a better life than they had. And they read books like mine, or books like Wes Moore's, or J.D. Vance's, in order to learn the lessons and sort of remind themselves of the kinds of mistakes and pitfalls that you can experience when you're in those circumstances, and then to help their children avoid them.
16:29 Speaker 00 There's two types of stories, both in fiction and in nonfiction, that people gravitate to. One is the troubled story where you have someone who legitimately comes from nothing and then kind of makes it. The second one is almost this other story of somebody who they were born into royalty, but then by dint of their circumstance, they're poor. But they have these famous parents somehow, or something, the Cinderella story, or the Luke Skywalker story. They actually were born with these powers, these magical powers that happened, or something like that. Someone else helped them realize it. To me, the former one is so much more appealing than the latter, because most of us aren't born with anything. We're not like a secret prince or princess.
17:13 Speaker 00 That trope of the child who's born in seemingly humble beginnings, but then you discover that they're like Superman or something. They have these superpowered parents on Krypton. That's not the reality. You know, I point out in my book that real life isn't a fairy tale. It's not a comic book. Somehow, yeah, that's appealing to us. I wrote this Substack post a while ago. I use the Captain America. Movies is an example where you have this scrawny kid and then he just meets this magical scientist to injects him with this super soldier serum. And now he's this big buff superhero and I'm like, that's not how reality works. And not only did he get injected with the serum and he's super strong, but then he suddenly knows expert level hand to hand combat and combat arms training. And he knows how to use every weapon and that's just not the reality.
17:54 Speaker 00 And you never see him sitting around, reading the US Army field manual or reading Clausewitz or Sun Tzu or anything. He just knows everything about war and combat. The Matrix is like that too. He played a video game for like three hours and now he's expert level fighter. The reality is if you want to achieve something, you have to have some base level of raw ingredients and talent and ability. But it just takes endless amounts of hours to cultivate that and to bring that out in someone. But even if you have a really bright little kid, if they're not stimulated in the right way, if they don't have role models and access to resources and those kinds of things, that ability is never going to express itself. And I talk in trouble about how at one point in one of the foster homes, I never learned how to read.
18:35 Speaker 00 And so they sent this psychologist to administer this IQ test and I scored way below average on the verbal section. And it wasn't because I was dumb, it was just because no one read to me and there were no books around and I was changing schools all the time. The fantasy is one thing, but the reality, even if you have a kid with talent, it's very different, still requires a lot of effort and hard work. Now, there are so many kids who have either one parent who's just completely overworked or they don't even have parents that are with them on a regular basis. What can society do better for these kids? I think there are a few things. I mean, one that comes immediately to mind, since we've been talking about spotting talent. There was this movement to guest standardized testing, which was another luxury belief that I could rip about.
19:16 Speaker 00 But I think that every high school should essentially make standardized testing SAT or ACT mandatory and free. I remember in high school, I never took the SAT because I learned that there was a testing fee. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, so I didn't want to bother with the financial aspect of it. Now I know that there are waivers and fee reductions and all these things for low income families. But that information is the least available to those very families, how college works, how to apply. Let's just make it free and make every kid take it. And that's a quick way, I think, to spot gifted young people. Schools with low income, they could just. Pay for it through the school or something.
19:57 Speaker 00 There was a study out of the Chicago school system where they identified a lot more gifted kids once they started requiring kids to take standardized tests. Don't all schools in all states have some standardized tests that even second graders take? Probably, yeah. But they don't use it. And I think they should, and they should administer something like the SAT to identify these kids and get them on track. But then the other thing I think is to concentrate more on family and what's really important for kids and supporting the emotional stability and security of young people. That's one thing I try to point out in troubled is even if you have kids who grew up like I did, whether in poor or dysfunctional or unstable situations, foster homes or what have you.
20:42 Speaker 00 Even if every single one of those kids goes off to college and earns a comfortable, middle-class living, they're still carrying all of those really difficult experiences with them. And ideally, we want to get to a place where fewer kids have to experience that in the first place. People who have a lot of political or economic or social influence could do more to prize and prioritize things like marriage, things like supporting young families, supporting kids and ensuring that people are putting the needs of young people first to help them to be sort of emotionally secure and stable. And even if we focus only on that, more kids as a byproduct would end up going to college and achieving upward mobility anyway.
21:24 Speaker 00 Melissa Carney in her book, The Two-Parent Privilege, she points out that the number one predictor of graduating from college is being raised by two married parents. I mean, that outperforms everything socioeconomic status, whether your parents went to college, anything like that. Whether we're focused on what happens after the age of 18 or what is going on before, I think we should focus more on the family question, too. A lot of people talk about the decline in birth rates, but at least in the US, married women are having roughly the same number of children as they were 25 years ago. But unmarried women are having like way fewer children. And of course, fewer people are getting married. It's both a problem we're having fewer kids as a society, but then at the same time, as a percentage of kids, fewer of them are. Born to unmarried people.
22:07 Speaker 00 This is a fascinating analysis in The Economist that came out late last year, which especially among people who spend a lot of time online and who read legacy media and college educated people, they are focused on their own group. And they think, oh, the reason why the birth rate is declining, a lot of them think this, is because, oh, women are going off to college and they're delaying child rearing. And so fewer children are being born. But actually, college educated women are having just about as many children as they've ever had. Whereas it's poor and low income women who aren't having as many children. I've been sharing this online and people will applaud this and say, oh, that's great. That if you're poor and unmarried, maybe you shouldn't have kids. And this is a good thing. But I think there's another way to think about this, which is maybe we should be promoting marriage.
22:49 Speaker 00 Because married people tend to not be as poor as unmarried people. And I know there's this discussion about, oh, is it that wealthier people are more likely to get married? Or does marriage help you to make more money? I think it's a little bit of both. There is evidence of a treatment effect of if you get married, you are more likely to go on to have higher earnings for a lot of different reasons. So if we promote marriage, then as a byproduct, we'll end up having more kids anyway. Because most people want to get married first before they have kids. But there's been this interesting generational shift where when I was a kid, there was a period in my childhood where I lived with two teenage girls. Both of them were teen moms. They had multiple kids with multiple different fathers, didn't have a relationship with them. And now here we are, this is 20 plus years later.
23:31 Speaker 00 Those kids of those girls grew up and they're in their twenties and they don't have any kids. On the one hand, it's great. You don't want to have kids if you're not ready for it, if you're not in a position in your life to have them. But on the other hand, if we as a society want children being born into healthy and happy circumstances, then we should promote people to form strong, sturdy relationships with one another. What do we do to promote marriage? Well, I think there are different ways to do it. There have been successful public awareness campaigns that have changed the behavior over time. Smoking, for example, in the 1980s, about 40% of Americans smoked at least one cigarette per day. And then through concerted efforts to share information and knowledge with people that, hey, smoking is bad for you.
24:14 Speaker 00 And sharing the statistics and the data and so on. Smoking doesn't just affect you, it affects your people around you, secondhand smoke and so on. And gradually, now today, I think the number dropped from something like forty percent in the nineteen eighties to about fifteen percent today. I think we could do something similar, some kind of public awareness campaign. When I was a kid in the nineties, I remember turning on the TV and every third commercial was smoking's bad for you, smoking's bad for you. If we did the reverse of that with marriage, if you find the right partner, marriage is good for you, marriage is good for you. I also wondered, a lot of governments are paying people to have kids. They give people a stipend or some kind of financial incentive to have children and it's been met with a very limited success. With the exception, I think of countries like Hungary.
24:54 Speaker 00 But generally, it hasn't been as successful as people thought it would, but I wondered if we could instead pay people to get married. We've been talking about status, if we could attach it to some kind of status. People do this with grants, for example, but if we have the marital matrimony fellowship. And if you're a recipient of this, you get money, you get status, maybe you get featured in some magazine or something. You get the money, you're now a named fellow and you find a partner. I think this would incentivize people. I'm not talking about like enforced marriage or some kind of arranged marriage, but just find a partner. And if you find someone you like and you get married, you're gonna get a hundred thousand dollars deposited in your account and you'll be a fellow of whatever. And I wondered if that might be more effective because you get the financial incentive and the status increase.
25:37 Speaker 00 In marriages in general, we're seeing, at least in the US, the rate of marriage has gone down dramatically, but the rate of divorce has also gone down dramatically. So the people who are getting married are presumably happier in their marriages. Divorce is even easier to get today than it was in the past, so presumably they're happier, they're staying in it longer, they're more fulfilling. Even though the marriage rates have gone down, so maybe just the more committed people who really want to be married or getting married. And getting divorced is not necessarily the best thing either in a child's life. Or sometimes people who get divorced don't even have kids. We don't want just marriage, we want marriages ideally that last at least for some period of time.
26:17 Speaker 00 I'm enough of a libertarian that if there are no kids involved and you enter a contract with another adult and then you want to break it, fine, mutual agreement. But if think if there are kids involved, then you have to start prioritizing their needs. But then, once they leave the house, from that point, it's just adults making decisions. But you're right, that I think the reason why divorce rates have declined is because fewer people are getting married in the first place. And the people who are getting married tend to be conscientious and a lot of self-control. Willingness to commit to something. And those people are also getting married later and maybe later they're a little bit more mature. Sometimes if you get married when you're 21, you may be more immature. You may pick the wrong partner or other types of things.
26:57 Speaker 00 Everyone used to follow the very same life script, regardless of class, regardless of political orientation, money, background. That you reach a certain age, you go to college, you get married and you have kids and you have that family. And now marriage is just one option among many. The sad thing is that once it became an option among many, I talk to a lot of young people now where they tell me that they would like to find a partner. They would like to get married, especially young women in particular. College educated young women are having a really tough time finding a partner and they want marriage. Now that we've removed marriage as the default goal of dating, you don't date just to date and have fun. People used to date to find someone, settle down and get married. And people I think out there are having some difficulties.
27:38 Speaker 00 When you talk to these college educated women, they say they want marriage, but then when you ask them, who are you looking for? They're looking for this narrow unicorn that's very, very hard to find. And assume that narrow unicorn has gazillion options. It's almost like asking, okay, who do you want to marry? I want to only marry a supermodel. Good luck. If someone is 40 years old and they've wanted to get married for 10 years and they're not married. It's not necessarily the market, it's something about them too, or their choosing. I think that's right. Any kind of deregulated system, power laws tend to apply generally, let the gains accrue to a small percentage of people. And this is true in an anarcho capitalist society. You play Monopoly long enough, one person ends up with all the money.
28:19 Speaker 00 We had something similar happen with relationships where we have an increasingly deregulated dating marketplace. And now with the introduction of apps where there's like this frictionless way to meet more and more people. You mentioned this unicorn, the guy who's really tall and really handsome and really successful. A lot of women would like to date that guy, but because so many women want to date him and because men being how they are, are reluctant to settle down when they have lots of options. Then this creates this frustrated group of young women who are trying to find a guy. And there's also this message in society about how you shouldn't settle. You should find someone, you should find someone who you like. And you shouldn't go for anything less than that. And I think that's at odds with reality,
28:58 Speaker 00 whether it's a job or a partner or where you live or anything, there are always going to be these bounded constraints as far as how great something is going to be. And you have to be realistic about yourself and your resources and your means. And then from that point, you can, I think, make a more reasonable decision instead of waiting for that dream job or the dream partner or the dream house or something. It's interesting when you talk to people who are looking to be in a relationship and you ask, okay, like, what are your deal breakers? And they'll sometimes name like the most trivial thing. Okay, yeah, the person cubs that they're high on heroin and they beat me all the time. Okay, that seems like a legitimate deal breaker or something. And they're like, they don't like the right comedy or they don't like to ski. People have so many random deal breakers that are out there that just seem pretty crazy.
29:41 Speaker 00 There's this whole discourse. I don't know how online it is. When I talk to young people in real life, social media bleeds over. This whole, oh, red flags and giving someone the ick and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, they don't like to ski or they eat their food in a certain way or their favorite movie is X. And you may have seen some of these on Twitter where it's like, oh, I saw this guy, he had these books on his bookshelf. That's a red flag. You need to get out of there. And the books are often inoffensive. It's like, oh, he has George Orwell on his bookshelf. That's a red flag. People need to be a bit more reasonable about this. When I talk to especially reflective and smart young women, they're aware of this. But a lot of people, that thought hasn't arisen in their mind and they haven't really reasoned with it yet, that there's no perfect person.
30:24 Speaker 00 We all have flaws. We all have imperfections and shortcomings. And if you want a partner to settle with, especially as you grow older, you're going to have to make compromises along the way. And that's not a message, though, that we often hear. The flip side, men are reporting way higher rates of loneliness than women. Why is that happening? Well, I mean, there are individual personality differences between men and women, which may explain why there's this loneliness gap where men are generally lonelier than women. Women tend to be a bit more sociable. They tend to have larger friend groups. This is an interesting finding from Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar, where he finds that women tend to have like a tight knit group of friends. Friends, whereas men are more likely to have a best friend, one or two friends.
31:07 Speaker 00 When women have friends, they are more likely to stay in touch with them. They'll text them, they'll call them, they'll be sort of more involved with their friends' lives. They're also tend to form deeper relationships with those friends because they're more likely to talk about personal topics. Whereas men are more likely to shy away from personal topics and talk more about work or talk more about topics that don't necessarily help to cultivate those deep, deep relationships. Sports or something. Sports, or yeah, when they hang out with their friends, it's usually an activity. There's this phrase, face-to-face relationships versus shoulder-to-shoulder relationships. And guys, we tend to do shoulder-to-shoulder. I mean, it's interesting, even when two guys talk to one another, they're more likely to stand at like a 45-degree angle where they'll be tilted slightly towards each other, but still facing forward, away from each other.
31:51 Speaker 00 Like a Parisian cafe, looking at the sidewalk but looking at each other. Exactly. Whereas with men and women, when a man talks to a woman, they are comfortable with face-to-face discussion. When two women talk to each other, they're comfortable with face-to-face discussion. But yeah, I think there are personality differences and then just differences in the way we approach our friendships. You're seeing this now with young guys where no one teaches you how to make friends too. So I think once a lot of young people leave school, once they leave college and they enter the work world, college makes things so much easier. This is something I tell young people too, is there's this artificial environment. Everyone around you is the same age as you, easy to find a romantic partner, it's easy to find friends. It's just easy to like find your people that you're comfortable with and who have the same interests as you
32:35 Speaker 00 and are at the same stage in their life course as you. But then you enter the work world and not only are young people not fully equipped to like find a partner, but also friendships, a lot of people have a surprising difficulty with that because there isn't a lot of guidance on either of those things. Women are now way overrepresented in higher education. A lot of these colleges have 50% more women than men. UCLA, I think is 60, 40 women. Med schools are even more extreme. I think UCSF is two to one women. I think it's 66, 33 women to men. And obviously, this is all very recent. This is all just happened in the last decade or so. What do you think are going to be? Some of these second order effects of that.
33:17 Speaker 00 I've talked to administrators and people who work in admissions committees at universities, and they more or less freely admit now that they practice a version of affirmative action for male applicants. In many colleges, it's somewhere between 100 to 200 SAT point difference between men and women. It's wild because up until, I think, the 1980s, men outnumbered women because of sexism and prejudice and so on. There were way more men in colleges. And then in the 80s, it reached parity. And ever since then, it's been tilting more and more towards women. But what I've also heard is that if a college campus dips below 40% male, then that college attracts fewer female applicants. Of course, yeah. That's why they have to do the affirmative action.
34:00 Speaker 00 Because women want to meet men, too. You know, they want to go to college to get an education, but you also want to go to meet a romantic partner and to date and those kinds of things, too, as this goes on, because it seems like it's becoming harder to find those male applicants. And even if you give them an extra 100 or 200 points on the SAT in terms of how you treat their application, they still are having difficulties. So we may reach this point now where college itself may become less important. We probably will see sort of more mixed education marriages where women are more likely to date or to marry guys who didn't go to college, but who are still successful otherwise in their careers. We're already seeing these interesting experiments and disruptions in higher education. And so college as a status symbol in general probably will weaken.
34:44 Speaker 00 The signal of that degree will weaken over time for all probably, but certain elite institutions. I think like a cachet will probably be there to some extent, but generally, college itself will probably become less important. I'm hoping this will correct itself, that dating itself seems to be increasingly difficult on college campuses because of that gender skew with more women than men, and that there will be a way to resolve that as well. A lot of people, I think, men more likely than women, tend to be later bloomers. Certainly, a lot of women are that way as well. It's unfair to judge someone when they're 17. Their whole trajectory of their life is judged by a few things that they do when they're 17, where a lot of times people are still maturing.
35:24 Speaker 00 Then I meet a lot of people who, when they were 17, they were just in completely backward situations. Even when you read your book at 17, you never would have predicted your success. But even not even that extreme, like may have good parents, they may have other types of things when they're 17. They're just not ready and they go work at the local fast food place. And by dint of just their own curiosity, they later start reading. They weren't academic in high school or middle school, but probably so many people are not even given the chance to go do that. It's so hard if you're not on that track when you're 17 to like later get on it. I've had this conversation with other late bloomers too.
36:04 Speaker 00 That was one of the things that Richard Reeves has recommended as a policy proposal about red shirting boys, starting them in school. I think one year later compared to girls. So boys would start kindergarten at six instead of five or something like that. Whereas girls will continue to start at five because girls tend to be a little bit more mature and conscientious than the boys. This is surprisingly common, the late bloomer thing. It certainly at elite private schools that already happens quite a bit. Let's say you have a July cutoff. You may have girls who are born July, August, September, who are still in that class. But the first boy who's in that class is usually November or something like that in the cutoff. And then the rest of them are kind of red shirting. So they'll be like old for the other class. In my case, it was the reverse where I was slightly young.
36:48 Speaker 00 I graduated high school when I was 17. That may have contributed as well to my delayed development. There are a lot of young guys out there who are later bloomers and it takes them a while to find their footing, especially when you are kind of raised in the circumstances that I was. If you grew up in a low income or deprived or dysfunctional environment where maybe there is some innate ability or something in you that wants to succeed. But when you're young and a little bit immature and have difficulties with impulse control and you're surrounded by temptation all around you. It's just hard to focus. But I think that one way to identify and accelerate success, even for late bloomers, is to put them in a more stable and cultivated and rigid environment.
37:31 Speaker 00 The way that I was in the military, I didn't really recognize. My own curiosity and interest in those things until I was in a place that was predictable and stable. And I had good mentors and role models and people around me. The whole time I was in high school or up until I was 17, really. I don't think I met a single other young guy who likes to read books for pleasure. I was the only one among my friends and I wasn't embarrassed about it. I would read, but they thought I was a little bit of an oddball. It wasn't merciless teasing or anything, but they would say like, oh, you weird or you like to read? And then I get to the military and I met like smart guys in the air force who likes to read books and novels and fiction and nonfiction. And I'd have conversations with them and I'm like, oh, like it just felt nice to be around other smart people. Who like to talk about ideas.
38:14 Speaker 00 There's got to be a way to find more of those kids and put them in environments where they can flourish. In some ways in college, you have the elite schools, the Yells, the Harvards, the Stanfords of the world. My guess is there's still going to be a very important signaling thing in the future. And those will still be places people want to go. But then you've got maybe another tier down, the Villanova's of the world. They're good, they're fine schools, but they don't confer the same type of status on someone unless you're like a big basketball fan or something. Those to me seem like they're going to have way less import in the future. Do you agree or disagree? It's so hard now, Orin, and I'm sure you've been reading a lot and hearing a lot about AI too. I can see arguments on both sides.
38:59 Speaker 00 I can see on the one hand, you could say because education is shifting and because the signal is weakening, that people are less likely to go. But then on the other hand, I could say because AI is taking over and because we're going to need some evidence of human competence. In one form or another, even if it's imperfect, even if it's an inefficient way to signal that competence, such as getting a four year bachelor's degree. That at least it's something. And so I could also see the argument almost going the other way where you want more people to go to college. Because otherwise, how else are you going to stand out and differentiate yourself in a world where things are increasingly controlled by robots? I just really don't know. I do think generally, at least in terms of a signal for intelligence. I remember growing up when I was a kid thinking everyone who went to college was smart.
39:44 Speaker 00 That was the belief because most of the adults around me didn't go to college. Whether in real life or watching TV shows, smart kids go to college. You got to get ace to go to college. And now I grow up and I meet people who went to college and I'm like, oh, a lot of these people aren't that. Smart. I think it's increasingly true. I don't even know if there's a correlation. The correlation becomes weaker. So at least as a signal of intelligence, probably not, but maybe as a signal of conscientiousness, or as a signal of ambition, or something else that a college may still have some kind of value. It's not just going, but finishing. That might mean you need some stability, maybe familial stability and other types of things to make it happen. There's a way of at least signaling your class in some way.
40:28 Speaker 00 Exactly. Middle tier universities, I don't think they're gonna go away, but I do wonder about the degree mills. These for-profit predatory schools, a lot of them did end up shutting down during the pandemic anyway, but I think more and more of them, they're going to attract fewer applicants. People would never pay for any of these things if you didn't get the piece of paper at the end. They're not often paying for the learning. When I buy your book, I don't get a piece of paper saying, I read the book. I can't brag to my friends about it. I'm paying because either it's entertaining or I'm going for the knowledge, et cetera. But when people are going to college, the main reason they're going usually is because they want that piece of paper they can put in their resume. I'm sure you've come across Brian Kaplan's work on the case against education. And he points out,
41:14 Speaker 00 if you're really paying for an education, then why do students cheer when the professor cancels class? Because you're technically being deprived of a lecture that day. You're being deprived of the education you're paying for. But really, if all that matters is that piece of paper at the end, then of course you're going to be happy that class was canceled because you get the paper without putting in the effort. There's something to that. There may be other efficient ways of identifying promising young people without having to go through that obnoxious four-year process. There are ways to identify smart kids through testing. But then what you mentioned before, like one of the things about a four-year degree is class, conscientiousness, who your family is. If there's a quick way to test that, it seems less clear because part of the
41:56 Speaker 00 signal of commitment and conscientiousness and willingness to stick with something is actually having to do that for a solid four years. One thing that helped me quite a bit when I was applying to college at a much later Age was because I had been in the military. That too is the kind of signal you sign a contract, you serve it, you're honorably discharged. And that too sends a signal. So I think for a lot of young guys out there and young women too, depending on your circumstances too, for both men and women. If you don't want to go to college right away and you have that sense of wanting to do something interesting and exciting and you know, there are the immediate direct experiences of enlisting. But then there are the indirect experiences and the signaling value of having served too, that goes a long way. And those things, I think a lot of young people don't think too much about that.
42:41 Speaker 00 But in a world where increasingly fewer people are serving, it stands out, which may be another reason you pointed out Wes Moore's book, Jay Vance's book and my book, that something about the military does do a good job of enhancing upward mobility. And one thing that I've pointed out in the past is that a lot of colleges, they claim to be egalitarian. And they claim to help with upward social mobility, but often what they really do, especially the elite universities, is recapitulate social divides. Part of the reason why these institutions exist is to stratify people by class and education and socioeconomic status. Whereas the military, it's almost the reverse, where the military is explicitly hierarchical. It's not egalitarian. They don't pay lip service to equality or anything.
43:25 Speaker 00 It's like literally a hierarchy. And if you're at the bottom of it, you get treated badly. And as you rise, you get treated better. And yet, despite the fact that it's an explicit hierarchy, it indirectly enhances upward social mobility. Because once you get out of the military, you're often in a much better position to enter the middle class. So there's this kind of interesting opposing function of what it explicitly is versus what it actually helps to produce in the real world. If you think of like a college degree, that still has just like a massive amount of value to people. But a master's degree, it seems over the last 40 years, that value has declined. And maybe even the value today is negative in many cases. If you just saw someone with a BA in history, it might be cool. A master's in history might be
44:07 Speaker 00 a big negative signal to a lot of folks. Fewer and fewer people are getting master's degrees. It's certainly not economically advantaged for many people. To go get that. What's happening there? I've actually seen interesting research on this that a master's degree may actually penalize future earnings, depending on the discipline, particularly in a lot of the humanities and some of the social sciences, that it's actually in terms of how much it costs to obtain the degree and then what your job prospects look like after. And not being in the workforce during that time. Yeah, but it actually may be negative. Even MBA degrees outside of a small number of schools, MBA is probably a net negative for most of the people. Let's say 80% of the people who get an MBA, at this point, is probably
44:52 Speaker 00 negative, where it used to be positive for almost 100%. This has really shifted. And then even law degrees, maybe the top 20, 30 schools, it's positive, but it's now negative. So even those more technical degrees, it seems those degrees are less good than they once were. And maybe because they're so much more plentiful. I wonder if it'll just take time for the market to correct itself because it's only, I would say, recently, maybe in the last five or 10 years, that there's been this growing recognition that education is a kind of signaling arms race where if everyone has a bachelor's degree, then no one does. When I was a kid, 15, 20 years ago now, the belief was everyone should go to college.
45:32 Speaker 00 More education is always better. The more degrees, the better. And it's an investment in your future. And I think now people are recognizing slowly that actually continuing to go to school, continue to get degrees, isn't necessarily the best move. And that there are other ways to more wisely and efficiently spend your time, if getting a better job is the goal. I do know some people who just enjoy getting lots of degrees and they just like going to school, but most people aren't like that. Then great. Good for you. A couple of personal questions. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe? I'm generally skeptical of conspiracy theories in general, although they do exist. I mean, it's funny, there are Cases in which they really do exist. In some ways, luxury beliefs is kind of a conspiracy.
46:16 Speaker 00 Although I guess the difference would be I'm not necessarily claiming elites all get together in a smoked filled room and say, here are the beliefs we're all going to believe. Let's keep the masses down. It's kind of this weird organic situation where very quickly, for a moment, it was the fashionable belief to say, we need to reimagine policing and change law enforcement. And that was the prevailing fashionable view for like six months. And then we thank God we moved past that. One possible conspiracy is there is this weird thing where for a while, a lot of the GI Bill money for military veterans was going to for profit schools. The majority of people who use their GI Bill were going to for profit schools. And I think I've tweeted about this. It's the easiest. Like a lot of these for profit schools, it's almost the reverse.
46:59 Speaker 00 Like an elite college, the acceptance rate is 4%, but the graduation rate is 99%. For for profit schools, it's the reverse where the acceptance rate is 99%, but the graduation rate is 4%. And so they'll take your money and they'll happily allow you to take all the classes and very few people end up graduating. In part because a lot of these classes are online, they're unstructured, there's not a lot of accountability. And I do wonder if there was some kind of collaborative effort to basically say like, oh, well, one way we can prop up this institution is to form a partnership with military tuition and with the GI Bill and with these government programs. And essentially it was a transfer directly from the government to these predatory colleges. One thing I try to tell veterans, because a lot of them will ask me about advice for college, and I would say, go to a not for profit
47:43 Speaker 00 college, go to your flagship state school, go to whatever school you can, but don't go to some weird degree mill that's online. I'm a little conspiratorial about that one. That actually makes sense to me. Last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice? And we've already talked about a lot of these things. Do you think is generally bad advice? One that comes to mind is never give up. There are cases in which I think if you really want something and you want it more than anything, then keep going. But I think a lot of people, they mistakenly think that, well, I started it and now I got to finish it. You can bring this down to something as small as a book. Well, I started this book, now I got to finish it. But there's always opportunity costs. And if the book you're reading sucks, just stop and read another one. There's better ways to spend your Time and your effort and your resources and attention.
48:27 Speaker 00 Even a movie, when my wife and I used to go to like theaters, sometimes you don't know then whether you really don't like the movie or something like that. And so we would have like a signal to one another and we'd stay if at least one of us wanted to stay. But if both of us wanted to leave, you don't want to find out after the movie, oh, wow, I want to leave halfway in or something, then you should just like take out. A related one that just came to mind was there are cases in which time can be worth more than money. If you can find ways to spend money to save time, depending on your circumstances, I think that can be worth it, too. I remember when I was in Airman Leadership School, I was 23 years old. So I was going through this training program to become a non-commissioned officer. And the instructor for this class was this Filipino-American guy. He had served some
49:12 Speaker 00 time in prison and then got out and then was able to get a waiver to enlist and completely changed his life. I remember I was telling him after class, he's like, what are your plans today, Henderson? And I'm like, I gotta get back. I gotta clean my apartment. And he was like, why are you cleaning your apartment? How much is your time worth? You gotta get a cleaner, man. What are you doing? That thought never even occurred to me. It seemed like such an outrageous, outlandish luxury to have someone clean my apartment. And I'm 23 years old and I'm like, you think I should get a cleaner? And he was like, yeah, you could spend that time doing other things. You could be studying for this class. You could be preparing for your career, getting promotion. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, okay. At that point, I was just in a financial position where I could do it. And so I ended up going through with it. And I've never not had a cleaner since then. So I thought it had to be a great decision. So I think that's another one is
49:54 Speaker 00 once you reach a certain point, it may be worth it to spend money to save time. But I think there's a common conventional view out there that do everything you can to save every dollar you can. And that's not always the best choice. This has been great. Thank you, Rob Henderson, for joining us on World of DAS. By the way, I follow you at Rob K. Henderson on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. I encourage our listeners to access your Substack, which I love as well. This has been a ton of fun and super interesting. Thank you, Auren. This has been great.
50:25 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review and check out worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.
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