Elite Lies and Luxury Beliefs | Rob Henderson | EP 429

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle with God." I'm looking forward to this. I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

I mean, if you look at the predictors of going to college, one of them is having two parents at home. That's one of the strongest predictors of going on to obtain a bachelor's degree. The other piece is, you know, when I think back to the guys I grew up with, and two of them went to prison. I had one friend who was shot. College may not have been the right path for those guys. College isn't the right path for everyone, but I do think that if they had been in an environment where there was more family stability, good role models, they, you know, they wouldn't have been shot to death.

Hello, everybody! I'm talking today to Dr. Rob Henderson, who's a novelist and a public intellectual, a psychologist, and author of the recent book "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class," which was released in February. We really talk about not so much his book exactly, although also that, but Rob's experience growing up in the foster care system in the United States, in California, and what—and his transformation, sequential transformations of personality and status as he moved from the foster care system—a very fragmented, um, and chaotic childhood upbringing—into the military, and then to Yale and to Cambridge. So, quite an upward arc on the academic and intellectual side.

We review his book, the autobiography that's laid out in this book, talking about his early experiences and concentrating as well on his developing ideas of family fragmentation and the manner in which that fragmentation has been aided and deed by the same elites essentially that Rob studied with at Yale and perhaps to a lesser degree at Cambridge. He's the originator of the notion of "luxury beliefs," right? The idea that the elite classes, who are yammering constantly about privilege, have as one of the privileges they're unwilling to discuss the privilege of adopting ideas that are very, very, very harmful to dispossessed people, especially those who are economically dispossessed. They have these ideas of unstable family structure, for example, that when implemented in the real world are absolutely catastrophic.

We talk about that too, uh, and so join us for that. So I just reread your book "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class" last week, and I found some topics that I'd really like to zero in on. But the first thing I'd like to know is when exactly was your book published and how is it doing?

Uh, it was published February 20th, so as of this conversation just a few days ago, I think it’s doing well. It seems to be well received. A lot of my Substack subscribers are leaving positive feedback on Goodreads and on Amazon, and it's been reviewed in various outlets, and so far, I’ve been really pleased with how things have developed. I hit some strange obstacles on the way. Initially, my publisher and I thought we'd do some kind of a mini book tour, maybe visit some bookstores, do some book signings, and that ended up not going through, which was really disappointing for me. But fortunately, others have stepped into the breach, and we've been able to do some events outside of the bookstore promo circuit. But so far, I’ve been very pleased.

Okay, so well, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about because I saw some allusion to that on probably on X. So why have you been unable to arrange a standard book tour in bookstores? I mean, you'd assume that, you know, bookstores would want to sell books since that's what they do. And you know, I ran into trouble with booksellers with my books because they certainly didn't promote them, and they often hid them. That was particularly true in Canada. Now, what effect that had is hard to say. It might have had a positive effect all things considered because it was publicized, but still, to call it appalling is to say almost nothing. It's this kind of B underground shadow banning that seems to be a characteristic of our age.

Okay, so what exactly happened to you, and how do you explain it? Because you know, you’d think that your book, if your book would have been published in the 60s, it would have been something like a clarion call to the left, right? Because you grew up under restricted circumstances, to say the least, and it's a tale of you prevailing despite that. Um, it isn't the sort of book that you would think would attract censorship attention like you're not the guy to attract that attention fundamentally.

So why don't you walk me through that? Tell me what you make of it.

Yeah, it was a surprise to me. I didn't think that my book was particularly controversial, but perhaps my sense of these things, you know, I don't know how much it can be trusted because the line is always moving constantly as far as what's acceptable versus unacceptable and the line around political correctness and so forth. But I think the message in my book was perhaps to some degree unfashionable. I write in the book about the importance of responsibility taking control of your life. In the later chapters of the book, I discuss some of the phenomena around elite universities, the self-inflicted controversies at Yale and some of the other Ivy League schools.

I describe luxury beliefs and point out some of the hypocrisy of the elites, and I think a lot of people who run bookstores maybe didn't like that message very much. It's not a very trendy message to describe because I don't attribute a lot of the difficulties that my friends and I experienced growing up to systemic forces or to other fashionable sources. And so your diagnosis of the problem, my diagnosis of the problem, well, I focus a lot on family and the deterioration of family, and that is not a topic that a lot of educated elites want to talk about.

Um, so that's one possibility for what was happening with the bookstores and why I got frozen out. The other is the associate—I have some of the endorsements. So, uh, the back of the book I have endorsements from, uh, you know, people like Nicholas Christakis and people like JD Vance, and there’s a blurb from you as well, Dr. Peterson.

Oh, that’s funny! Well, a friend of mine actually showed me he was at a bookstore recently, and he showed me that there's a sticker, you know, there's the book, and then they have the sticker of the book—the bookstore price with their logo—and there were two copies of my book, and it was your name carefully covered with these stickers of the bookstore just covering Jordan B. Peterson. And, uh, if it was one book, maybe a coincidence; for both books, I thought there was—there’s—that’s, you know, that was, uh, intentional.

Um, and so I think that as well, but the thing is, even even that, I think those two possible reasons are intertwined because you deliver this message as well about responsibility of family, of—I think you and I, you know, we discuss a lot of the same issues and a lot of the same social ills that are plaguing society. And so the bookstore promo circuit was shocking to me because I thought that I would have been kind of the right person to do that. Um, you know, there are sort of big-name people—you know, there are certain people, certain authors, if they were to do a book signing at a bookstore, it wouldn't work because they're too famous and too well-known and the store would just get overrun.

And then on the other hand, there are authors who don't have a lot of traction online, not a lot of presence in social media and so on, and they wouldn't be able to attract very many people to come for a signing. Whereas for someone like me, I've done a few events now. I'm out here in New York and I can attract a few dozen people, and that's roughly the right kind of, uh, crowd you would expect for a bookstore signing, and yet they had no interest.

But you know, I would look at other authors who are doing bookstore signings and they, even if they don't have the same online presence as me, they have messages that the legacy media really like. There's that recent memoir in defense of polyamory of open marriages, you know, and these bookstores love to host authors like that because it's provocative and interesting and it promotes a certain dogma, and my book is not like that, and I think that's one possible reason they didn't want me.

Well, the funny one of the things about your book is that it's in many ways it's not political. You know, I mean my sense of your book was that you detailed out the consequence of having your family life fragmented and the consequences you observed in the kids that you associated with of having their family lives fragmented, right? And you weren't—most of what you said by doing so was implicit rather than explicit, right? You grounded—you grounded the arguments in your lived experience, so to speak. I mean that's not all you do because well, you also make reference to the relevant research literature, but it's appalling indeed that you're not encouraged to tell your story because it's a—it's a very interesting story.

And anyone with any sense would pay attention to it. I'll tell you part of the reason it struck me, but maybe what I'll let you do first. Why don't you just tell everybody who's watching and listening just give them an outline of the book's structure, and they’ll have a better sense if they haven't read the book of what we're talking about.

So it's an autobiography, but why don't you take it from the top and just walk people through it?

Right. Uh, well, I wrote this memoir describing my very unusual trajectory into higher education and some of the lessons and observations I picked up along the way. I was born in Los Angeles into poverty. My mother, she was from Seoul. She came to the US as a young woman to study. She became addicted to drugs and was unable to care for me. We were homeless for a time, then we lived in a car, and then eventually we settled in this slum apartment in LA, and I never knew my father. My mother didn't know who he was either.

So she was—so I was in this apartment with my mother. She would tie me to a chair with a bathrobe belt while she would get high. Um, she would have visitors coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night, um, trading favors for drugs. I, uh—and by the way, I know all of this information because later I received this thick document full of information, uh, from social workers, forensic psychologists and others who were involved in my case when I was in the foster care system in LA, and so I read these as an adult as I was writing the book to prepare.

And so my mother, um, she was very neglectful. Uh, eventually some neighbors called the police. They heard me crying and struggling to break free from this chair. The police arrived, and uh, she’s questioned by the police and then later by forensic psychologist asking, uh, who's Robert's father? You know, what's going on in this kid's life? She didn't know who my father was either. Um, she claimed that my father's name was Robert, and that's who I was named after, but that was the extent of the information she could provide for them.

So at age three, um, my mother was arrested. I was placed into the Los Angeles County foster care system and spent the next just shy of five years living in seven different homes all across LA.

Um, and how old were you when that happened, when you were taken away from her?

I was three years old.

I was three—but three, yeah.

Okay, and so—and then you spent the next seven years in a combination of homes in...

Yeah, in a variety of different homes. Um, later I did get some information about my birth father. So, uh, I actually took a 23andMe genetic ancestry test last year, went my whole life not knowing this, but, uh, I’m half Hispanic on my father's side, and you know, I made this joke—I posted this on X—that, you know, I wish I had known this when I was applying to colleges.

Um, but you know, a friend of mine—I showed him the results, and he was like, okay, so you know, you were sort of Asian mixed race. He was like, you know, you went to bed white adjacent and you woke up as an underrepresented minority. Um, but I didn't—I didn't know this. Uh, and so spent—you know, I lived in El Monte in San Gabriel Valley. These are kind of rundown areas in Los Angeles. Some of these foster homes had upwards of 8 to 10 kids living in them.

Um, LA is one of the most overburdened—I mean, the foster system in the US in general is extremely stressed as a system, but LA, it's especially bad. So I remember some of these homes: we'd have four kids to a room with two bunk beds, two kids on the top bunk, two kids on the bottom. There are just so many children who need homes and not very many foster parents available, and so the tacit agreement seems to be that, you know, as long as kids are being fed and aren't actively being abused, that it's better for them to be in one of these homes than to be sleeping on the street, which is which is true.

But, uh, the system is extremely disorderly and it's just impossible to supply care for that many kids, uh, in, you know, for a limited number of adults. And so I document these experiences in these homes. It was difficult for me, um, for a lot of reasons, but one reason was the level of uncertainty and instability because not only would I not know how long I would be in any particular home, but sometimes I'd enter a foster home and I'd befriend some of the other kids there and then they would be taken.

Um, maybe, uh, someone from their family of origin would re-enter the picture, and so the kid would return to their aunt or mother or family member, or they'd go to another home, and so not—you know, it was just a lot of—I don't know where I'm going to be. I don't know where these kids around me how much longer they're going to be around. Um, and then eventually, after seven different homes in this cycle, I was adopted by this working-class family and we settled in this kind of dusty town in northern California called Red Bluff, which is located in one of the poorest counties in the state.

And this was the late 90s, and at the time I wasn't aware of this—I was just, you know, I was a little kid—but in hindsight, you know, having read a lot about class and family formation and what's occurring, uh, across the country, I got this front-row seat to witness firsthand the kind of family breakdown that scholars like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray and others have been documenting over the last few decades.

And so my adoptive parents divorced, and there was a lot of chaos and financial catastrophe and drama—not just in my life with this adopted family but the lives of my close friends and those around me in this blue-collar town. And I described some of my friends’ experiences and their outcomes as well in the book.

And then you closed the book—I mean, so you end up in a family that's actually reasonably stable for some period of time, although it had its instabilities as well and its confused instabilities. But you go from there to the military, and you actually—this is another reason maybe why your book is contentious, because you actually have pretty positive things to say about your military experience all things considered.

I mean, I think you ran into its limitations for you after it had disciplined you to some degree, but you certainly do point out that for you, especially at that time in your life, the predictability and relative severity of discipline—predictive predictable severity of discipline—was actually very good for you, and you found mentors and a pathway in the military that put you on a solid track.

Yeah, that got you funneled to higher education. Might as well fill that part in too.

Well, yeah, that's right. I mean, the enlisting in the first place was—it was not the most well-thought-through decision. By the time I was 17, going through all of these experiences, um, I just knew that the path I was on was not the right path. Um, I saw by this point I was sort of self-aware and reflective enough that I saw where my life was headed, where the lives of my friends were going. I had two jobs in high school. I worked as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant and then I was a bag boy at a grocery store, and I had some older male co-workers in their early-mid twenties, and I would interact with them and hang out with them.

And you know, on the one hand, I was 17 and I kind of thought these guys were cool because they’d buy beer and weed for my friends and I, and you know, they were, you know, they were just older cool guys who had access to things that my friends and I couldn’t access. But I did, even at that time, I did think it was strange that some, you know, 25-year-old guy would want to hang out with a bunch of high schoolers and drink beer with us.

And I thought to myself: is this what I want to be when I'm 25? And you know, that carefree life living weekend to weekend is fun when you're 17 or 18, but when you're 25 it just seemed a little pathetic. And so I barely graduated high school; I had a C-minus average, a 2.2 GPA. Um, I didn't know what my options were. I mean, well, I knew my options as far as university were concerned were basically non-existent.

But one of my male high school teachers pulled me aside one day and he, you know, initially during the school year he would sort of prod me and berate me and say, "Why aren’t you doing your homework? What's going on at home?" And I would blow him off, or I would back talk. And then eventually I think he kind of gave up that route and just started talking to me and asking me, you know, we talked about sports or we talked about whatever television—we just talked about whatever was interesting to me.

And one day he showed me a picture of himself in an Air Force uniform on his computer. He pulled up this photo and he basically said, "This might be an option for you." He said, "You know, I can tell that you're not academically focused at the moment, but I can tell you're a smart kid, and this might be a good option for you."

And so that, you know, that was one of the things that planted the idea in my mind. There were others as well. I lived with my—his brother my senior year of high school, and their father had also been in the Air Force, and he tossed that idea out to me.

And so there were these kind of male figures in my life—not quite role models, but just older male figures that I trusted. And at that time, I probably wasn't aware of this, but I was longing for that kind of guidance from some older male mentor or figure, just someone who could give me some advice on what I should be doing with my life. I didn't have a father; I had no male presence at home. And so the military became this option. I enlisted as soon as I graduated high school. I was still 17 years old.

Um, I had to have my adoptive mother sign a—I mean, essentially it was a permission slip because I was still legally underage. I was the youngest guy in my military unit in basic training, and you know, in hindsight, that was probably the best decision I ever made because it completely removed me from all of the bad influences of where I was growing up and all of my—all of the sort of—all of the freedom that my friends and I had.

I—in the book, I write about this experience. A friend of mine had been sentenced to prison, and when he got out, I met him. You know, we met at a bar, had some beers, and I was talking to him, and we kind of came to this same conclusion around the benefits of limitations and constraints, where we both talked about, you know, I was telling him about my experiences in the military and basic training and all this stuff, and he was telling me about the routine and the mundane everyday structured life of prison, and we both came to this conclusion that we both hated it at first, but then after a time we grew to appreciate it for what it did for us, for providing these boundaries.

And my friend—I mean, it was funny, he actually said, now that he was out, he actually sometimes missed it. He missed having that predictability and that routine and that structure, and neither one of us had this when we were growing up. And so the military did sort of contain my impulses and give me some structure and channeled some of my aggressive and impulsive energy toward productive ends.

In the book, I write about the young male syndrome and how the military finds ways to direct that towards something that is beneficial.

Well, you know, the standard hypothesis for hard-headed criminologists with regards to incarceration is pretty—I mean, it’s pretty blunt and pretty straightforward. You can—there, you know, of course, about the age crime curve, so I think criminality among men peaks at 19 and then it precipitously drops off after 26. And what prison does, in many ways, is segregate very badly socialized men until they mature.

Now, you know, it doesn't do an optimal job of that, but the standard penological doctrine is it isn’t rehabilitation even; it's housing, especially for the repeat offenders. It's housing till they, they say, burn out, but that isn't really what happens. They don't burn out; they mature. And I think what happens if you grow up in a very, very chaotic environment where there's very little attention paid to the future and everything's about the moment, that there is no structure that facilitates cortical maturation, essentially.

You know, you can imagine that all those underlying competing motivational drives—sex, power, aggression, you know, the standard Freudian panoply—they have to be brought together under the rubric of some organizing structure, and that's essentially patriarchal. It's essentially masculine. That—and I don't think there's any difference, you know, Freud talked about inhibition of aggression and inhibition of sexuality, but that's not a smart way of thinking about it; that was a major error on Freud's part because it's not inhibition; it's integration and it's maturation.

And the cortex is an inhibitory organ, but it's an integrating organ more than anything else. And part of the reason that you were crying out, I would say in the book, for guidance is because you were looking for a story that represented a mode of being that would be the pathway to maturity.

So here’s a definition of maturity: I’ll try this out on you, and you can tell me what you think about it. So the more immature you are, the more you're dominated by motivational and emotional drives, and they have a very short-term time horizon. The time horizon is basically now. So if you’re anxious, you want to stop being anxious now. If you’re in an incentive reward state, excited and enthusiastic, you want gratification now.

And now means what's pleasurable in the moment. What maturation means is what works for you in the widest variety of situations over the longest possible span of time. But it also means something else: it means what's good for you and everyone around you in multiple situations for the longest period of time.

Now, you need a certain amount of stability in your environment for an attitude like that to even pay off. But I don't think there's any difference between that expansion of time frame and the integration of lower order drives and emotions and maturation. I think those are all the same thing, and if you're in a chaotic environment, see the other thing too—and this is something that's relevant about your memoir—is my sense has always been that a child that's neurologically intact needs one good model. That's enough.

And like you can derive it various ways. You derived it partly from reading, but then you put it together piecemeal from the fragments of people you met as well, right? Zero role models is a catastrophe. And part of the problem with fragmented families is that zero role models is frequently the case, yeah? And so there's just nothing for the young person to grab onto.

The other thing that struck me about—there's many things that struck me about your book. Another one of the things that struck me too is that—and I learned this a while back—is that schools are absolutely appalling; appalling beyond comprehension at helping young children plan. Like there's—I built a program online called Future Authoring that helps people plan. And if you give that program to young men before they go to college—this is especially true for ones that don't have a very good academic background—if they sit down and write a plan for 90 minutes, unsupervised with no feedback on the plan, they're 50% less likely to drop out.

Wow! Yeah, no kidding, no kidding! Fifty percent! Like, it’s insane. And what that points to is the fact that no one ever sat them down and said, "Okay kid, where do you want to be? You could be somewhere in five years." That's the first thing to announce, like you could take control of your life and you could be somewhere in five years. If you could be there, where would it be?

Now, I noticed in your book, you know, when people did point that out to you, that was like a life raft for you. And you make that point clear with the story about seeing the older guy that you talked about in uniform. Like, it's something, isn't it? It's some vision of at least a possible future, right?

Yeah, yeah. And it was, um, I—yeah, I didn't have a lot of stable guidance, like you said. It was fragmentary. It was through books, through pop culture, through some of the people around me. Um, but yeah, I mean, on the point around schools, you know, I remember I—so in the book— I think it’s quite clear that I'd always had some academic inclination. I was probably more oriented towards academics than my friends, but my academic performance was responsive to how stable my home life was.

When there was stability at home and predictability and adults providing some oversight, my grades improved, and I started to become more focused on homework and tests. But then inevitably, there were just so many reversals and upheavals, and my grades responded to that as well. And by the time I reached high school, my grades were in the toilet.

So I did pretty well in middle school, and I got placed into these advanced courses in high school, and I was placed into chemistry, which was one of the advanced science courses. And once you know, this was kind of where my head was at when I was, I don’t know, 14 or 15 years old was the class was difficult and I didn’t want to put in the effort, and I had no adults around me saying you need to do this; you need to put in the effort.

And, you know, so impulsive 15-year-old kid, I went to my guidance counselor and said, oh, I want to be put into the lower-level science course. And he gave me this, you know, this spiel about how, H, you know, it's going to throw off your academic trajectory. But, you know, here's this paper; if you can have someone sign it, you know, that's fine.

And so I forged my mom's signature and went into the lower-level science course, and that was the extent of it. And you know, when you're a kid without much in the way of guidance or mentorship or role models, it's very easy to make unwise decisions like that, uh, and I did that repeatedly.

Well, the issue in that situation is quite clear. Why wouldn't you take the easy route out? Yeah, I mean, it's always like psychologists always have things backwards. Always they ask stupid questions like why do people take drugs? That's a stupid question. The question is why don't people take drugs all the time?

Yeah, 'cause you can get lab animals under some circumstances to just self-administer cocaine non-stop, right? So, the mystery of short-term motivation isn't a mystery; the mystery is, well, under what conditions might a young man be motivated to do something difficult like take a chemistry course, for example?

And the answer to that, so this is a question I have for you too, because you could read your autobiography and your ups and downs academically two ways. You could say—and this is the way you lean—so that partly why I want to ask you the question your grades varied with the stability of your environment, but I'm wondering to what degree your grades varied with the—what would you say—the attractiveness of the vision that you saw, you know? 'Cause like when you got to the military and you saw a career in front of you, for example, you buckled down and worked like mad.

Now, I know you also had the stability there, but you know, it's not easy to discriminate between the conditions that enable people to thrive because they can see that sacrifices—they're making sacrifices towards something they, they have clearly come to value—versus they're supported by people in a stable environment. So I'm wondering about your thoughts on that.

I, uh, yeah, I like that distinction. I mean, perhaps sort of implicitly or unconsciously I was longing for that long-term vision, but I would just say, like, in the moment, it was, you know, I don't think very many 17- or 18-year-olds are really thinking that far ahead into the future in a sort of a deliberate intentional sense.

I—I really think it was about sort of responding to the incentives of the moment. And one of the things the military did and one good parenting and good sort of adults and mentors do is sort of contain that energy so that once the young person reaches the point where they have the ability to reflect and consider the future, you know, you sort of shepherd them to that point, and now they can sort of think about their own futures and what they want for their lives, whereas for me, it was more just about making bad decisions and containing that to reach that point.

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Now, right. Okay, well, so we could say that in a stable environment—maybe this is a way of rectifying the two perspectives or or reconciling them—you could say that in a stable, well-run household, the value of the future is implicit in the rituals of the household, right? Like the household itself—the reason we would regard it as well-run and stable is because it does take a long-term view.

And so—and your point is—yeah, go ahead.

Well, as you're saying this, and then even as I'm thinking about my own answer, I'm realizing it’s—I'm actually leaning more and more towards your point now. And a story just occurred to me that I tell in the book, actually.

Um, so there’s this—there was a period in my adolescence where there was some stability. My adoptive mother entered a relationship with this woman, um, and they raised me from roughly age 9 to 13 with, you know, some hiccups along the way and after. But I remember I was—I was 13 years old and my mother and her partner Shelly, they, um, you know, I had some chores and some responsibilities around the house, but they wanted me to, uh, to build a fire in the mornings so that the house would be warm by the time they got up at 7:00 to get ready for work.

So they asked me to get up at 5:45, 5:30 and do this for them because, you know, heating a home with firewood was less expensive than central heating, and northern California can get a bit frosty in the winters. And I remember I argued with them about this, and I was angry, uh, this idea that I had to get up so much earlier than everyone else in the house.

And my mom and Shelly sat me down, and I'm 13 years old, and again I probably wasn't thinking that much about the future, but they used this—they said, you know, Shelly she sat me down. She said, “Your mom and I work all day to pay the bills, and you know, you're getting older and you need to contribute to the house,” and they said, “You’re the man of the house.”

And I remember when they used this term, um, it sort of reframed that chore. It went from this burden being put on me that I wanted to battle against to, no, I'm a productive member of this household, and I'm doing something for my moms, for my adoptive sister. I'm doing something to make their lives easier.

Um, and so perhaps what you're saying about the value of the future, if it's put in the right way, if the story is told in the right way—and that's what that was—the man of the house was this vision, this story.

Yeah, that it did unlock something for me in my mind, but you know, it had to be—it had to be presented to me in that way. I wouldn’t have arrived there on my own.

No, no, right, but I mean I would say that is the opportunity of responsibility, right? And it does—because it's very easy—and this is why conservatives I think have a hard time talking to young people—it's easy to make an obligation into a finger-wagging necessity, right? Like a moral obligation. But that isn't the right way to frame a genuine responsibility because if it's a genuine responsibility, it actually matters if you do it, and the reason it matters is because if you don't do it, things actually don't go well.

Like there's a value to your sacrifice. That's a good way of thinking about it, and they did strike the right chord with you. And I remember that part of your book because what they indicated to you was that that was a way of signaling your mature worth—not of signaling it, I don’t want to use that language—of expanding yourself up into that role.

And so how long did you light the fire, and how did you feel about doing that?

Uh, I mean it was for that entire winter, and actually, even the winter after that. And I felt, you know, I felt great about doing it after that. I mean, you know, day-to-day, it was, you know, obnoxious and burdensome, and you know, there were mornings I woke up and wished I didn't have to do it, but when I would see, you know, my mom and Shelly and everyone in the house wake up after me and, you know, the house was warm and I could see that and people were comfortable.

And you know, when I woke up, it was freezing, and then when they woke up, it was warm, and I would go to school in the mornings with that knowledge. And, right, yeah, I felt great about myself for doing that.

Yeah, yeah, one of the bright—see, that's very well. That well, that's so interesting, right? Because that shows you too that that the idea that you're inhibiting your impulsiveness is not right. It's what you're doing is you're transforming the idea of responsibility into an incentive reward technically by associating with a— with an overarching goal like a—but a genuine goal.

And you might say, well, goals are arbitrary. It's a moral relativism argument, but they're not arbitrary because, for example, if the house is cold, then people suffer. Now you could say, well, that's arbitrary too, but you know, if you're the sort of person who thinks that suffering is arbitrary and you can make relative arguments about it, there's no sense talking to you anyways because it's just not going to go anywhere.

But it's so interesting to see that, you know, the proper framing of that task trans—I know I understand the fact that it was still difficult for you. You still had to get up in the morning when it was cold and light the fire. You know, so it didn't change the proximal discomfort, but they awakened you to a higher order way of apprehending your environment, you know.

And it's clearly the case—it's continually the case through your autobiography that when someone opens a door like that for you in a way that you found credible, that you instantly motivated you even did that to yourself to some degree with reading.

So why don't you walk through that too? Because you know, that was the first account I had read of someone who learned to read well at an old enough age so they remember the realization.

So, you know, what happens to lots of kids—and this is so appalling because there's no excuse for it whatsoever—so reading is burdensome until you can read for meaning, right? So if you're sounding out words or even if you're sounding out phrases or even if you're still trying to figure out sentences, you know, because you haven't automatized the perceptions, then it's effortful.

But as soon as you cross that threshold and now you're reading for meaning, it's instantly, insanely rewarding. And so what you need to teach kids how to read is mass practice at automatization, right? So they need to see b, p, q's, and d's 10,000 times so that they build a neural circuit that just recognizes letters, recognizes two-letter combinations, three-letter combinations, you know, common words, then common phrases. That's about when you get to be an expert reader.

But you can remember actually working through that yourself. So why don’t you tell the story about learning to read, why you decided to do that, and then also what reading did for you?

Right, yeah. I didn't learn to read until I was seven, and you know most people have memories of age seven, and that was an important memory for me. So I was changing schools every 3 to 6 months, uh, changing homes, and no one read to me. And so I had to teach myself.

Um, I remember it being a really—I remember just being embarrassed initially. You know, by that point, second-grade teachers would start to call on kids to read aloud in class, and you know I would make a joke, or I would say I didn’t bring the right book, or I would find ways to get out of it. But I remember at one point, uh, my teacher said you know she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I think I said I wanted—I wanted to be a scientist, and this was because I'd caught some bit of Bill Nye the Science Guy on TV back in the 90s at this time.

And, uh, you know she said, “If you want to be a scientist, you have to learn to read.” And I said, “Bill Nye never reads.” And you know she said, “Well, he doesn’t read on TV, but you know every scientist has to learn to read.”

And so, you know, like, okay, so if I want to be a scientist, I have to learn to read, it sounds like. And then by that point I started to piece together that really, if you want it to be anything, you have to read.

Um, and so the teacher let me borrow some kindergarten-level books. I took them home and slowly worked my way through it. And you know, I knew the alphabet and I knew how to sound out each letter, but it took a lot of effort to get to the breakthrough point that you just mentioned of, okay, here are the individual letters and then here are the words, and then you put the words together.

And then after working through that repeatedly again with books meant for four- and five-year-olds, and I'm seven, uh, finally it started to click, and I could see the images in my mind of, okay, you know now things are clicking for me and there’s a story being told here. Uh, but it—you know, I didn’t even understand that that’s what I was supposed to be doing when I was reading. I would listen to stories that others would tell me when they would read.

Yeah, I wonder if that’s the point where you, where the auditory and the visual connect. There’s an overlap area between them and the overlap areas between the higher order areas of the cortex are the areas that, uh, Luria Alexander, Luria the great Russian neuroscientist, psychologist identified with consciousness per se.

I wonder if that breakthrough moment—when you—'cause that was quite striking in your book 'cause you said you remember when you became proficient enough at reading, which is really an auditory phenomenon, right? It’s like you're using your eyes as ears when you’re reading. And then all of a sudden, it’s hooked to your visual imagination, right? That connection emerges.

It's got to be an overlapping system. So now the words can activate the images, and that’s when true understanding begins. It was very interesting to me to see that you could actually remember when that happened.

You know, but it's a sad thing, you know, this is an unforgivable failing of the education system because computerized tutors could teach every child to automatize letter and word recognition. It's like the smart kids—the higher IQ kids are going to learn to automatize faster, but it would be a rare kid indeed who wouldn't get there with sufficient mass practice.

And a computer—computers are so good at that—you know, so good presenting, presenting, rewarding, presenting, rewarding, presenting, rewarding, and that's all you need. You just need that immediate feedback. Now see, you said something very interesting in that story too, because you linked your motivation, once again, to something approximating a vision or a plan. You know, you said you had nursed as a child even though it was just more or less a casual encounter with Bill Nye.

You thought, well, maybe a scientist is something I could be. Okay, so now that gleamed as a distal vision. And then the teacher informed you that you were going to have to learn to read because you got to ask yourself, you know, what in the world was it that actually compelled you to swallow your pride and admit that you could only read kindergarten books?

That's a tough blow, and it's really easy for kids who should have learned something earlier to do everything they can not to admit that to themselves because it's embarrassing. So, but you did admit it to yourself, and then you went and you actually studied, which is by yourself, which is actually quite a difficult thing to do when you're not extracting out meaning from the words.

Do you remember at that time, like was it because you had—I don't want to put hypotheses into your mind, but what do you think it was that actually motivated you to do that work?

Uh, well, I think a part of it was maybe a sort of a baser motivation of just not wanting to be embarrassed in class anymore when the teachers would call on me to read, wanting to keep up with the other kids, being able to communicate with—you know, kids would talk about books or, you know, be able to make friends and to not be, you know, this oddball kid who always had to find ways to skirt the coursework.

And then yes, seeing people on TV or people in movies and these images of people who seem to be interesting and successful, and so on, that seemed like something I aspired to, something like that.

I mean, it’s funny like you mentioned, you know, high IQ kids can sort of find ways into teaching themselves to read and going down that path, and that is what I did. But, I mean, it’s funny, so right around this time when I was teaching myself to read, I was doing so badly in school that, um, the teacher and my social worker, they thought that I might have had a learning disability.

And again, I was changing schools all the time and changing homes. And, you know, in hindsight, I thought it was a little bit, you know, it's ridiculous that—and you have this young boy who’s not doing well in school and the—instead of sort of investigating this, you know, living in foster care and all of the instability and disorder, the response was to medicalize it or to put some kind of diagnostic label on it.

And you know, fortunately, so they sent this psychologist to the home and I took this test and I scored—I actually scored just below average, so I was like in the range of normal. And part of the reason I scored so low—I did okay on the other portions—the other subdomains of the test. But the verbal score was really low, and that's because I didn't—I know how to read.

Um, and some of the, you know, some of the questions I gave this half-hearted effort. It was a very sort of messy my responses to this, and again, I have the files and the reports from this period. And so, you know, it's just, you know, coincidence or, you know, very fortunate, I guess, that I, I scored just high enough to avoid being labeled and medicalized and so on.

Um, but one of the points I try to make in the book as well, you know, the question around IQ and nature and nurture and so on, is that having a curiosity and academic aptitude is necessary, but not sufficient to do well in school, and so I had the sort of raw ingredients, but that’s, you know, that's just one portion of it. You also needed to be channeled.

You need all of the other things you and I have been discussing, and I didn't have any of that. And so it wasn't until I was in an environment where, you know, my—you know, in order for my habits to have been stable and predictable, I needed to be in an environment that was stable and predictable. And once I reached that environment, then those good qualities started to shine through.

They shone through on occasion when I was in school, but it wasn't the same. And so, yeah, the reading portion was important. Once once I learned to read, um, that became a source of comfort, and it was soothing for me. Uh, once I started to go to school libraries, check out books, I started to read biographies and memoirs, and this was a way for me to—you know, I was sort of drawn to people who also had undergone and risen above difficult circumstances.

And I didn't know at that time, you know, I wasn't consciously aware that I was seeking out these stories for some specific reason, but in hindsight, I think I was looking for some kind of inspiration or some a source of guidance.

Yeah, yeah, well, definitely, definitely. And unsurprisingly, I mean that's what stories are for fundamentally. And it’s not surprising at all that you would gravitate to the ones that bore most specifically on your circumstances.

It's also interesting too, you know, that this is part of that interplay between environmental instability and planning. There isn’t a lot of point in planning if your plans are always going astray for reasons that you can’t control, right?

And it is also something that can undermine your faith in planning itself. And one of the things the military did for you clearly was set up a circumstance where the rules of the game were very clear, right? If you if you did the work, you were going to get the reward, and that actually worked, right?

And so you say in your book, for example, that there was one—at one point you were promoted much earlier, much more quickly in the training regime than was typical, right? So you could also see a direct payoff there. You know it's—it's shouldn't say direct; it worked on both ends, Jordan. It was, it was the reward was immediate.

You know, you perform these tasks and excel, you'll be rewarded, and then on the other side of that, if you commit these transgressions, if you violate these guidelines, you'll immediately and swiftly be punished. I think both of those things were important. You know, you're sort of almost trapped.

The military is like this—I don't know, like a giant Skinner box or something of like do this, you know, positive reinforcement, negative—it’s all there. And so even something as simple as failing a drug test. So they have these random drug tests; you never know when it's going to occur. If you fail a drug test, you can be court-martialed and go to military prison.

Whereas in the outside world, for my friends, for example, who didn't follow that same path, I mean, you can do a lot of drugs, you can have a lot of promiscuous sex, you can commit a lot of crimes and drink and drive, you can do all of these things, and that can carry on for years before finally the consequences arise from that.

Whereas the military had this system in place that, you know, if you drink and drive once and you're caught, you know, that's—you know, then it's prison. If you do this, you know, it’s the penalties are very explicit, clear, and swift. And so it works on both ends: punishment and reward, and I think both of those pieces in place were important for me.

I mean, it’s funny, I did do well on the military exams and the promotion, and I was always promoted ahead of schedule. And it’s strange because even in those moments, my good and bad qualities shine through. I was promoted early and I earned those promotions, but, you know, as I was writing the book and describing my experiences, it may not have been ideal for me to have achieved promotion so early because, in the military, at least in the Air Force at this time, once you reach a certain rank, they allow you to move off base and get a house or a place outside in the civilian world.

You know, you still go to the base for work when you're on duty, but then you go home to your residence. And so I got promoted very quickly and when I was 19, I got a house with some friends off base, and we turned this into like this giant kind of party house.

And that allowed me to make bad decisions and drink a lot and get into trouble. And so strangely, you know, it’s almost sort of ironic that the fact that I was able to excel led to this point where I was able to be in a position of complete freedom again and start to make self-defeating decisions.

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[Music]

Jordan.

Right, right.

Well, one of the things—okay, so let’s talk about the chaos a bit more. You know, because when I was reading your book, there’s certain overlap in our experience because I came from a little town way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, and it was only about 50 years old, and it was a working-class community, and most of my friends never went to college or university. A few did, but not many.

And but there were some differences between—some important differences between my time upbringing and yours. Okay, so almost all my parents’ friends had intact families, so my mom and dad had, let’s say, five sets of close family friends. And this was also true for my relatives, by the way; my mom and dad’s siblings—so my aunts and my uncles—virtually no divorce. It was also true for my friends.

Now, my relationship with my father was much better than the relationship most of my friends had with their fathers. That was often a consequence of alcoholism—not always, but often. But all my friends who had certainly the same kind of delinquent tendency as the people that— as you and the people that you describe hanging around with, they all had intact families.

Right? So the thing that really struck me about reading your biography was the additional cataclysmic consequences of continually fragmented primary relationships.

Yeah, well, this is—I mean, yeah, it's—that is an interesting point. I mean, I remember listening to you sort of describe your early life in other platforms and podcasts and mediums and thinking about how sort of working-class communities have changed over time.

Um, so I cite some statistics from Charles Murray's book "Coming Apart" where, you know, one of the most striking ones from that book is that in 1960, 95% of children born in the US, regardless of social class, socioeconomic status, were raised by both of their birth parents. And by 2005, for the upper class, for people with college-educated parents with white-collar jobs, it dropped from 95% in 1960 to 85% in 2005, so slight dip, but the norm—two-parent intact families are the norm in kind of upper and upper-middle-class areas, whereas for the working class, it dropped from 95% in 1960 to 30% in 2005.

Um, these are non-college-educated blue-collar working class. And that, when I read that statistic, it perfectly reflected my own experiences. You know, now, post-college, the friends that I have made since, you know, leaving the military and obtaining degrees and so on—all of them, without fail, have been raised in intact families.

And then I think back to Red Bluff and my time there, and I had five close friends growing up. I write about some of their experiences in the book, and of the six of us, none of us were raised by both of our birth parents. There was me, sort of raised in foster homes in varying states of disorder. I had friends raised by single moms, one friend raised by a single dad, one friend raised by his grandmother because his mom was addicted to drugs and his dad was in prison.

And that's like a very common picture now of what these communities look like, you know? I remember seeing an interview with you, Jordan; I don't remember which it was, but you described how family deterioration has sort of hit people based on sort of their level of marginalization and vulnerability and predictions and so forth, and how it sort of hit sort of poor black families first, and then, you know, poor white families, working-class families, and now what I was seeing in Red Bluff by the late 90s, even kind of lower-middle-class families were also kind of deteriorating more and more, sort of creeping more and more upward.

But there's still that sort of rarified upper segment of society, the top quintile, say the top 20%, that they are almost completely shielded from this and have no exposure to what's happening in the rest of society.

Yeah, well, let’s, let’s go there. I want to walk through your biography a bit more so that we can talk about your experiences with higher education. Maybe we can meld that into what we're going to talk about next.

Okay, so I left my little town and got a college education first, and then I went to a fairly large university in Edmonton, and then I went to McGill, and so I was kind of climbing up the ladder of sophistication and educational sophistication and urban size, right?

And then I went from McGill to Harvard. And so I came from that little town and hit the top of the academic pyramid. It’s certainly—that was the case in the 1990s, and that was really something.

And so I got a chance to see—so in Alberta, in the province I grew up in, there wasn’t much of a class structure at all. Alberta was too new to have a class structure. Montreal had a clear class structure, and Boston, of course, much clearer than Montreal even.

And so I got to see what it meant that a class structure existed. And one of the things I really came to understand as I progressed through the university system was this warped elitist culture that increasingly came to characterize the universities.

And so what I saw—look, a lot of the students I had at Harvard were really top-rate kids. And Harvard in the 90s was a very merit-based institution. Now, if you were a legacy student, if your parents had gone to Harvard, you had an edge at admissions, but even so, the probability that you were going to be a legacy student who couldn't cut it was pretty damn low.

So— and the typical student was extremely academically gifted and then good at least two other things, right? So these were stellar students. But the more radical types, they had this proclivity that really disturbed me, which was that having all the privileges of being privileged wasn't nearly enough; they needed to have all the privileges of being privileged and all the privileges of being underprivileged at the same time.

And so I want to run a variant of the luxury beliefs idea past you because I think luxury beliefs have—which is a lovely phrase, by the way—they have two dimensions. The first is they provide you with a universal explanation for very complex phenomena so you don't have to think about them ever again, and the oppressor/oppressed narrative fits that perfectly, right?

Because you can analyze—it’s like Marxism gone—it’s like manic Marxism. Marx at least had the sense to note that the primary differentiator in terms of oppression was economic, and you can make a reasonable case that to those who have more acumen, you can also make a case that once you have—it's easy to engage in regulatory capture to make the playing field unfair.

So you can sustain your advantage, okay? And so if you’re going to throw the Marxists their bone, that would be the bone to throw them.

Well, Marxism fell out of favor in the 1970s even among intellectuals, although they were very annoyed about it, and then it morphed into this metam Marxism where every single possible comparison between people became an oppressor/oppressed comparison.

Now the advantage to that is that you can learn that analytic process in 10 minutes. So we did some research in 2016 that showed very clearly that the best predictor of politically correct authoritarianism—so you can imagine that that's this insistence upon an oppressor/oppressed narrative—there's a cloud of ideas that surrounds that.

The best predictor of that was low verbal intelligence. It was a walloping predictor. It was correlated—I think it was negative .48. It was more correlated than grades and IQ. It was a walloping correlation. Okay, but—but there’s another element too, and this is probably more germane specifically to the notion of luxury belief—is that imagine that people have beliefs because they explain the world, but also imagine that they have beliefs because they confer upon the holder unearned moral virtue.

And this oppressor/oppressed narrative is a two-for-one because it provides you with a comprehensive explanation of every sociological, political, and economic interaction imaginable because they can all be viewed through the lens of power. Plus, it presents you with a one-move solution to being moral, and—sorry, there’s three elements—the one-move solution is you identify with the oppressed; you’re virtuous.

But then there's a, then there's the shadow of that which is, once you’ve identified the oppressor, you have a valid target for your darkest desires. So you've got three attractions to that dread doctrine, right? Stupid people can understand it quickly with no effort, that works out real well in departments of education, for example, or faculties of education or social work.

Yes, absolutely. Well, we know perfectly well that the disciplines in universities that have the students with the lowest IQ are the most woke—like the data are not; are crystal clear—so they’re crystal clear, right?

So it's very attractive if you're not very bright and that's also attractive to your teachers if they're also not very bright, and I'm talking about you faculties of education professors and so on.

And then you are morally virtuous because you're standing for the oppressed or for the, yeah, for the oppressed, or you can even claim oppression for yourself at least by proxy, and so there you get to have the advantage of being in the oppressor class, which you clearly are if you’re in elite university.

But because you’re an ally, you don’t have to, right? Exactly, you don’t have to pay any attention to that. Plus, now you have a target for your—this is where I think the anti-Semitism is really instantly understandable, right? Because there’s nothing more fun than being anti-Semitic with the moral twist.

But if you read the history of anti-Semitism, it's always been that way. Yeah, that’s not new, that's not new. You identify the Jews as oppressors, and then you're moral for persecuting them, and that's perfect, right? If you're resentful and bitter and you need a target for your bile and spite, that oppressor/oppressed narrative just gives you all of that at once.

And that seems to me—so you have worked a lot at fleshing out this idea of luxury beliefs and pop, and I believe coined the term and popularized it, which is, you know, quite an achievement because it's hard to—it’s hard to hit a phrase so accurately that it becomes a—you know, it becomes part of the culture.

You have to have a kind of poetic accuracy to do that. So tell me what you think about that conceptualization of luxury belief, and if there's anything that in your—it lacks.

Well, so, so, uh, I coin this term luxury beliefs, defined as ideas and opinions that confer status on the elite while inflicting costs on the lower classes. And no, I think that all of those sort of ideas that you laid out there fall under that framework.

A core feature of a luxury belief too is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. Um, and so, you know, as you're describing this, you know, the oppressor/oppressed—you don’t have to think too deeply. I'm reminded of a quote from the cognitive scientist Pascal Boer. He has this line: “Theory is information for free,” and it's kind of this tongue-in-cheek line that um, you don’t—you know, once you have the theory, you don’t have to learn anything because you just enter this new environment and you learn a few facts, but you have this theory available to you to just sort of twist everything into this, uh, system.

Compression algorithm, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and it allows you the difficult work of learning.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and then if you're removed from the consequences—which you are if you’re protected by your wealth—then you also are never in a situation where your idiot theories can be disproven.

Yeah, yes—ex—yeah. And then by the time your ideas are implemented into policy or into the culture, you move on to the next thing and you can just sort of outrun the consequences of your own beliefs.

It doesn’t always work that way, but it often does. Um, and then, yeah, the oppressor/oppressed, the ability to claim the mantle of virtue, I mean, I saw that so often. Uh, I see it still at elite universities that, you know, these inhabitants, these graduates, students and graduates of elite universities, it's—you know, it's not enough for them to be members of the sort of socioeconomic 1%, but they also want to be seen as good people, and I think they, you know, they wrestle with some of this guilt, I think, for being so privileged and so fortunate, and so they, uh, attempt to compensate by, you know, exploiting—

I mean, I saw this a lot at Yale. They're exploiting whatever commonality they have with historically mistreated groups.

Um, and some of it honestly seemed strategic and duplicitous because, you know, these are very competitive institutions, and every edge helps. And so if you can claim to be non-binary or you can claim to be a member of this or that or the other group, then you can get an edge in a prestigious internship or into the law school of your choice or whatever.

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[Music]

Jordan.

Okay, so that's been well modeled by the game theorists. So if you have a group of cooperators, so let's say they're agreeable and they are sympathetic to the—I don't want to say victimized, I want to say to the hurt and the sick, the hurt and the infantile, right?

The agreeable cooperators will attend to the sick, the elderly, and the infantile, right? Then you could think they're the ones who are genuinely in need. They're also the ones for whom provision of help is advantageous. So now imagine you have a group of those people together, and they’re all cooperating; they do just fine. But if you throw one psychopath into the equation, he takes everything, right?

And so this has been modeled out very well, is that the pathology of agreeableness is that it’s indefinitely open to subversion, right? And so you need—that’s why you need—and of course the psychopathic types, the narcissists, they know this perfectly well, especially the cluster B types because they’re absolutely willing to proclaim victim status as loudly as it can possibly be proclaimed on any dimension whatsoever to gain an advantage, to gain the upper hand practically.

But see, the moral upper hand, I think the right way to think about this is that there isn’t anything more valuable than reputation, right? Because there’s no difference between reputation—there’s no difference between reputation and wealth fundamentally. I mean, even monetary wealth is a form of abstracted reputation, so, you know, it’s just being tokenized essentially.

Like money's—money’s tokenization of reputation. Well, the problem is, is reputation can be gamed. And we know too that young women are much, much more likely to fall for the dark tetrad types because they mimic—they mimic reputation, yeah?

That’s their confidence and competence.

Yeah, exactly. They have the confidence of the competent without the competence.

Yes. I mean it’s—it’s—that’s, yeah, people value—especially more and more now—I mean this is a—the discussion around cancel culture and mobbing and all these things, I mean people treat it like it’s unserious, but people care deeply about how they’re viewed in the eyes of others and social esteem.

And I remember there was a study a few years ago that I read about. Um, this came out in 2017. Roy Balme was an author on this paper. I don't recall everyone, uh, on here, but they basically found that, you know, they looked at the World Value Survey and pulled out certain items and found that right next to physical safety, reputation was the second priority for people.

And they found—I mean it was interesting some of the studies that they did where they gave forced choice questions to participants in a—in a separate study in this paper where they asked people essentially, you know, would you rather have a body part amputated or be known as a Nazi or be known as a pedophile? And most of the participants said they would rather lose an arm or a leg than be known as something so vile as, you know, a pedophile or a Nazi.

I mean, people care deeply about these things, and so dark triad types are aware of this. They know how to target people’s reputations and for mobs. And I mean I'm really interested just all of the sort of the correlates of the dark tetrad, dark triad, these traits. One of them is age; you’re probably aware of this, Dr. Peterson, that there's an inverse correlation between age and scores on the dark tetrad such that younger adults score higher on these traits than older adults.

And yet we have this situation more and more in society and on college campuses and elsewhere where older adults are abdicating their responsibility and letting young adults who—a disproportionate number of them would actually qualify for clinical levels of psychopathy and narcissism. But generally speaking, they score higher than average on those scales anyway, and you know, just a large share of them, uh, are eager for power, for influence, for wealth, and they're willing to do whatever they can and take whatever maneuver is possible.

Well, I think there’s something also that’s even more ominous going on, Rob, because so the typical psychopath—historically speaking, was a wanderer, right? An itinerant, you know, and that's—that's a trope from every bloody horror movie you can possibly imagine: you know, the itinerant serial killer, for example.

Well, why do you have to be itinerate? Well, it's because if you live in a closed community and you screw people over, then your reputation gets around like instantly, and people are unbelievably good at tracking cheating.

Like there’s some evidence we have an evolved module for remembering cheaters. Like, it's a major deal—you have to go find new victims, okay? So—and you do that by hiding; you camouflage yourself, right, as a new person.

Okay, so now you might say, well, we've invented a new world; it’s a virtual world. Well, the thing I think virtualization enables the psychopaths because you can’t do reputation tracking.

Yeah, and God only knows how dangerous that is; it's happening online, of course. It's happening even in the real world. You know, I know we touched on this in our—in the last time you and I spoke on your show about dating apps, but one of the things that those things allow for—and you know, it's an online platform, but it allows people to meet in real life—is that now dark triad types, dark tetrad types are able to essentially have multiple partners in non-overlapping social circles.

Uh, so in the past if you wanted to sleep around, word would get out, and you’d develop a reputation as a scoundrel or a philanderer or so on, whereas now you can have multiple different partners who don’t know one another, who aren’t members of your social circle, and none of them are aware of what’s going on, and this allows psychopathic types to indulge their appetites with no penalties—no reputational penalties.

It probably also generates even worse, right? Because, well, because you could imagine—imagine the borderline cases. So—and those would even be young men to some degree because they're tilted more in the narcissistic and psychopathic direction, and that would also be a consequence of incomplete cortical maturation.

Now, the problem with the problem with the, uh, what would you say, consequence-free dating is that there’s no price to be paid for your flurry. And now, so then the question is what do you become if you practice predatory sexuality?

And the answer is, well, clearly, you become—you tilt yourself in the psychopathic direction because what you're doing technically is deriving immediate gratification with no reputational or practical responsibility.

And the people who are advertising for hedonism—see, I just watched Cabaret. Have you watched the movie Cabaret?

I haven't seen it.

Okay, I would highly recommend it. It's about the Weimar Republic in Germany, and it's about a cabaret. It's about a young woman who's a cluster B type who wants to be a movie actress who's running down the hedonistic road at a cabaret, and she's quite promiscuous and diluted and clueless, and she has her little coterie of followers, and she performs at a cabaret.

And like many cluster B people, especially the histrionic types, she's got a certain degree of artistic talent, and that goes along with that fluidity of identity, you know, because artists are shape-changers, obviously.

And so, um, anyway, the movie tracks her descent along with people she more or less pulls along with her, but what's very interesting about it is that the director does a brilliant job of—this is that the Nazis are in the background constantly, right?

So there's this immense tension between this hedonism, this unbridled hedonistic short-term lifestyle that's hypothetically free and, and, uh, enlightened—like the luxury belief types—and the Nazis who are waiting in the wings, and I've been trying to puzzle this out conceptually.

So imagine that a large proportion of the population devolves towards impulsive sensuality, okay? It's a responsibilist mode of being, okay? But as your book indicates, things fall apart because of that. Well, when things fall apart, there's an unconscious clamor for the tyrant, right?

So you, so you get this hedonism-tyranny dynamic. Now you see the same thing in the movie Pinocchio. You remember in Pinocchio, the delinquent boys go to Pleasure Island, right? But underneath are the slavers who turn them into braying jackasses. It's the same.

And that movie was put out, by the way, just before the Second World War, right? So they had their finger on the pulse. But so there's this insistence in classic stories that hedonism and tyranny go hand in hand, right?

It's bread and circuses to some degree in the Roman emperors, right? But it's deeper than that. It's that if the entire population insists upon maintaining immaturity and the hedonistic gratification that goes along with that,