Psychologist on Dating Advice, Hookup Culture, and Foster Care | Rob Henderson EP 207

One thing that I try to stress in my book is that academic ability is necessary but not sufficient to do well in school so in other words you can have a really bright little kid but if they are mired in squalor and chaos and neglect, that potential will never reveal itself. I did a PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge, graduated a couple of years ago, and as a result,

These are the things that I'm kind of known for, the credentials, but before all of this, my life was a lot different. I never knew my father. My mother would have visitors coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night, trading favors for drugs.

I try to remember, you know, that I'm very much this kind of statistical anomaly. I'm not convinced that even if you had put my friends in private school, amazing parents, everything, that they would have necessarily gone on to college. in a different environment with different values.

to prison probably wouldn't have gone to prison. My one friend who was shot probably wouldn't have gotten shot. So I don't know how much we can raise the ceiling as far as enhancing social mobility, but I think we could raise the floor as far as how far down a lot of these guys fall. Rob Henderson, welcome back to my podcast. Thanks, Michaela. Great to be here. So since we last spoke, you have published a book, Trouble.

How's that going? It's going well. I remember last time I spoke with you on the podcast, I was in the midst of writing and this was like late 2021. And at that time, I was I was also in the middle of a PhD program and running some other side projects, and so I was plagued with a lot of self-doubt. My attention was spread pretty thin, and writing a memoir is always difficult, regardless of what's going on in your life, I think.

But the reception has been great. It's been well received. It's made multiple national bestseller lists. and been well-reviewed in multiple different outlets. And now I've just been really, really happy with how it's been going. A lot of those doubts have sort of dissipated.

Okay, well that's fantastic. So I wanted to start off this episode by getting into some of the stuff you discuss in the book. I can see why you wrote a memoir. There was plenty to write about. So, and I thought the way you outlined... how you got interested in psychology from what you went through was interesting. So I want to cover that. So you talked a bit about.

Well, let's start off with anyone who isn't familiar with you. Can you give a bit of a background about who you are and what it is you do? Yeah, well, right now I am a full-time writer on Substack, columnist at the Boston Globe. And, you know... an author now but i did a phd in psychology at the university of cambridge graduated a couple of years ago before that i did my undergrad in psychology at yale and

So these are the things that I'm kind of known for, the credentials. But before all of this, my life was a lot different. Most of the book just covers my unusual trajectory into higher education and beyond. was born in Los Angeles. and never knew my father. My mother and I, we lived in a car for a while. We were homeless for a time. Eventually, we settled in this slum apartment in LA. And when I was three, my mother eventually just became very addicted to drugs.

Some neighbors noticed the extreme neglect that was going on. and called the police and they came and saw the kind of squalor that we were living in where my mother would have visitors coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night trading favors for drugs.

So the police came, and then some social workers came, and eventually I was placed into the foster care system in L.A., where I spent the next five years moving through seven different foster homes all throughout Los Angeles County. and I describe some of those experiences in the early chapters of the book. and Eventually, I was adopted just before my eighth birthday and moved in with this couple, this man, this woman, and their daughter. They became my adoptive family. And we settled in this.

blue-collar town in Northern California called Red Bluff. It's kind of dusty, working-class town. And I didn't know this at the time, but I was kind of adopted into this community at an unusual point, I think, in American history. So this was the late 90s. And I sort of had this front row seat into witnessing the ongoing kind of fragmentation of working class families across the U.S. and probably in the Western world at large.

So my adoptive parents divorced about 18 months after the adoption. Oh my gosh. Which is really, I mean, by this point I was. I was nine years old. And, you know, the divorce, it was difficult, but, you know, I figured, okay, I still have my mom and my dad. But then my father, my adoptive father, subsequently stopped speaking with me after the divorce. And so this was really hard on me. Rob, this is so bad. I know. It's so bad. Yeah. And so at nine years old,

By this point I'm being raised by my adoptive mom, single mom. We moved into this duplex. My mom was working full-time, you know, trying to make ends meet. I was kind of this latchkey kid where I'd walked home to and from school.

made a lot of other friends who were kind of troublemakers and miscreants and these kids too came from single parent homes or broken families or homes you know i had one friend who was raised by his grandmother because his mom was addicted to drugs and his dad was in prison a lot of friends raised by single moms um with very, very little adult oversight. And so what do little boys do when they don't have much supervision? You know, they get together and so what would we do?

smoke cigarettes nine years old you know we started smoking cigarettes um drinking tequila i actually tell a story in the book about how i started drinking beer in the foster homes when i was five And then moved on to the harder stuff at nine. And then, you know, I had friends who had older cousins who could hook us up with like generic Vicodin or weed or pills or what have you.

Sometimes we just go to the gas station down the street and buy some cold medicine. And if you drink enough cold medicine, you'll start to feel funny. And we learned that. You know, there's a lot more to this which we can get into, but I can fast forward just, you know, when I was 17, I barely graduated high school, like a C- average, just sort of.

bottom third of my class and I knew I wasn't in a position to go to college so I enlisted in the Air Force and from there you know there were some missteps and some hiccups along the way but I did manage to become something resembling a mature adult. And then I went on to Yale on the GI Bill and onward from there. But it's funny, so my mother, my birth mother. She was from Seoul, from South Korea. and she came to the U.S. as a young woman, and she was...

Her father, my grandfather, sent her to study, but she was in L.A., and I think she got here in the early 80s, maybe the late 70s, and started partying. I think there were moments where she tried to stop, and eventually that life did consume her. So she was deported back to South Korea when I was in the foster care system in L.A. And I was an American citizen born in L.A. So I stayed. She left. No one knew where my father was.

So some forensic psychologist asked her, you know, where's this boy's father? You're not in a position to care for him. And she said she had no idea who my father was. And about two years ago, it was about a year and a half, two years ago, I took this 23andMe genetic ancestry test. And I'd never known my father's side of my background. So I was like, oh, my mother's Korean. I don't know the other side. I'm like, oh, mixed race, Asian, something like that.

And I learned that my father was Hispanic, so he had ancestry from Mexico and from Spain. And when I took this test, my first thought was, I wish I'd known this when I was applying to college. I'm Hispanic, that would have been really, it ended up working fine, but that would have been useful. That would have been useful information. You know, I took that test, I saw the results, and yeah, it was like overnight, I went from this like white adjacent Asian American to an underrepresented minority.

And, you know, that's... That was an interesting piece of information for me. And I don't know if it gives me any additional protection now that I can say that I'm Hispanic. I don't think it really does. But I still try it out. Yeah, I know. Fair enough. Use whatever you can use. If you guys want to purchase this magical supplement... See how it shines. And reduce your poisoning by alcohol.

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I hope you're enjoying this episode. Wow. Okay. So... So this is why your book is called Troubled. So how did you, how did you get out of, I mean, a lot of people that grow up with that kind of trouble, don't escape it. how did you manage to escape it were there things you read or what changed your mind did you notice that there was something better like how did you get out of

There's always that question of nature and nurture. I studied psychology and a lot of people who are interested in cognitive psychology and psychometrics and those kinds of things of course there's there is um you know there is kind of a genetic component to academic ability and intelligence and those kinds of things but one thing that i try to stress in my book is that Academic. ability is

necessary but not sufficient to do well in school. So in other words, you can have a really bright little kid, but if they are mired in squalor and chaos and neglect, that potential will never reveal itself, right? Now, that's not the same thing as saying every kid is special and every kid is a genius if you just put them in the right environment.

I'm just saying that if you do have a kid who is a genius, but they're in the wrong environment, you'll never see that genius or whatever. I'm not calling myself a genius, but you know what I mean? The ability to express itself. And so when I was in my final foster home... This was the seventh foster home I lived in in LA. I was doing so badly in school, partially because I was changing homes all the time and changing school districts, changing schools.

So you can imagine, I didn't know how to read by this point. I was in second grade, I didn't know how to read. And so... my social worker and the teacher, they spoke with each other, my foster mother. So eventually they sent a psychologist over to test me to see if I had a learning disability. And I took an IQ test and I scored. So I have the results now. So after I became an adult, my adoptive mother gave me this very thick file, all these documents from my time in the system.

And I'm looking at my results and I scored below average overall. I scored way, I scored like, I don't know what it was, like a 78 or something on the verbal section, which is like, you know, more than a standard deviation below average. And So, you know, I'm looking at these results and overall it was like, you know, it was below average, but not wildly so. So they just sort of kept me in the same class. They didn't put me in like a special needs class, but.

Quite obviously, the reason why my scores were what they were is because no one was reading to me at home. I had no reason to be motivated to try in school. I can't believe that they gave you an IQ test being like what what could the other problem be like maybe it's him yeah yeah well that's wow just in in the foster care system why did you end up Is that normal for a foster care kid to get switched that many times or is that extremely unfortunate?

Well, it's both. So usually what happens in for kids in foster care is that someone from the family of origin eventually reenters the picture. So it could be a lot of these kids are placed in care and they're raised by single moms, but then the mom, often it's drug addiction or mental illness or something, or mental illness brought on as a result of drug addiction.

A lot of these kids, they go into the system, maybe the mother sobers up, re-enters and says, okay, I can take care of the kid. Or maybe the father suddenly appears or an aunt or a grandmother. Someone eventually says, okay, you know, I'll take custody of the child.

In my case, that wasn't a possibility. And so the way that this foster system has been set up is so that If a child lives with one foster family for too long, and then the mother comes back and says, oh, I can care for the child, but the child's been living with this foster family for one year or two years, this can create issues around loyalty, attachment.

and the child would be reluctant to leave, right? Because now they've been with this other family for two years. Why would they go back to their mom? And so the system has organized itself such that The kid never stays in one place for too long. So this is on purpose. It's on purpose. Yeah. So they put a kid in one home, maybe six months.

hopefully not longer than a year, then another home, then another home. And the idea here is so that attachment never forms, so that if and when the family returns, the child will be perfectly happy to go back.

But in my case, that was never going to happen, right? And so I should have actually been placed into the... I should have placed them for adoption much sooner, but, you know, the LA County foster system is so overburdened and stressed that, like, no one actually carefully read my file and recognized that that was... you know, that I was never going to be returned with my mother. So yeah, and this is happening to a lot of kids even today.

That's horrifying. Yeah. Oh, that's terrible. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so we were talking about, yeah, that's terrible. I didn't realize that was how the foster care system worked. Yeah, yeah, and it's probably... At least as bad, if not worse. I mean, it was bad when I was going through it in the 90s. But I recently read this article in NPR. stated that the number of foster kids who have entered the system as a result of parental drug use has doubled since the year 2000.

So basically, since roughly the time that I left the foster care system, it's actually become worse and more overburdened and more kids. And this is in part as a result of the opioid crisis. just more kids being taken from their parents. I thought, and it's not like I had done any research

into this at all. But I guess I assumed that kids that were put into the foster care system were put in there while they were also on an adoption list. So as like an interim period until somebody wanted to adopt them that's not it no no no because again like a lot of these kids they um There's no reason to put them up for adoption because of the possibility that someone from their family will take custody. That's usually the main idea. But no, that's...

That's only the case for someone who steps in and recognizes that that's not going to happen. And then they... take the steps necessary to put the kid into the adoption system, which is what happened with me. So at some point in my final foster home, in my seventh home, I had to see a child psychiatrist. And this is just like sort of court mandated every so often the foster kid just has to get a mental health checkup. But this doctor that I saw, like, carefully read my file.

and saw oh like there's no parent for this kid and then he wrote like a sternly worded letter to the state suggesting that i needed to be put in uh put up for adoption and then like i was adopted like six months after that so Wow. Life in the hands of the government. That's horrifying. Exactly. That's what it is. Yeah. Okay. Wow. So anyway. we're talking about how you you got out of that you enlisted in the army air force air force air force but what

What happened to all your friends in high school? Do you know? Yeah. Did any of them kind of make it out too? Not really. So one thing that I try to do with Troubled is

So there's multiple ways you can read this. One would be there is this sort of conventional bootstraps narrative of, oh, there was this kid, and he was in foster care, and he grew up poor, and then he just... turn his life around and became very successful and that's that is you know that's a reasonable reading that is what happened but i wanted to also describe the lives of my friends and to tell the reader that my outcome is not the typical outcome.

And it's not an outcome you can expect for most kids who grew up that way. And so I had five close friends in high school growing up. So I had two friends raised by single moms, one friend raised by a single dad, another friend, I mentioned he was raised by his grandmother. And this is like a very common picture of what families look like now in working class and poor environments now.

And so I do this kind of epilogue thing at the end of the book where I describe how two of my friends went to prison. I had another friend who was shot to death. I had another friend who... He worked kind of menial jobs for a while and he was kind of like in and out of community college. Eventually he joined the Air Force just like I had. And then he kind of, you know, he did six years and then went back to his old life and he's okay, but he's still like not.

He's not flourishing. And that is kind of like the typical outcome of someone, even if they join the military and get out, they do kind of return and revert back to old habits. live the life that they were living before, although perhaps not, you know, the bad habits aren't quite as pronounced. And so, you know, I'm the only one who, like, went to college or university.

I try to remember, you know, that I'm very much this kind of statistical anomaly and that, you know, toward the end, I think in the final chapter, I try to... makes sense a little bit of how social mobility, how we should be thinking about it. And I'm not entirely convinced So I mentioned I barely graduated high school, and I was by far the most academically oriented of all my friends.

I was the only one who read books for pleasure. I would practice the math exercises in the textbook for fun. I wouldn't do the homework, and I wouldn't actually do the things they asked me to, but if something interested me, I would start playing around with it or reading or just... you know engaging with the teacher sometimes none of my friends did anything like that so i'm not convinced that even if you had put my friends in the most well-resourced, private school, amazing parents, everything.

that they would have necessarily gone on to college. I'm skeptical that that path is the right one for everyone. But I do think that... had they been raised in a different environment with different values.

with different role models and incentives around them that the two friends who went to prison probably wouldn't have gone to prison. My one friend who was shot probably wouldn't have gotten shot. So I don't know how much we can raise the ceiling as far as... enhancing social mobility but i think we could raise the floor as far as how far down a lot of these guys fall okay

Let's talk about J.D. Vance for a bit. Are you familiar with him? I actually, I don't know if this is embarrassing or not, I hadn't heard of him until Trump mentioned him. So what do you think of him? What do you think of his book? Um... Yeah, I've met with J.D. Vance a couple of times, very brief conversations, and I came away very impressed with him. He's obviously a very smart person. Just listen to him and speak with him.

And he was also helpful for me in the early stages when I was writing Troubled. Yeah, I have this story behind my connection with him. I wrote this New York Times op-ed in 2018, which was like a very sort of... a brief summary of my life and some of the lessons that I had learned. And that was published in 2018. And then JD's wife contacted me.

um saying that she had read it and then she connected me uh with jd oh cool yeah and so yeah i spoke with him for a while and he gave me some advice um because by that point literary agents were contacting me about as a result of that op-ed asking me if i wanted to write a book JD gave me some writing advice, some advice on navigating the publishing system. He and his wife were both kind enough to read my book. JD offered a very nice blurb and endorsement of Trouble.

Wow. I mean, he's just a rare figure in American life where you can start. you know, as poor as you can be in the U.S. in very rough circumstances in rural Ohio and then... through fortune and effort and so on. You know, he joined the Marines and went on to Ohio State and then went to Yale Law School and, you know, he had a successful business career. And so, you know, it is a very kind of classic American story.

for those reasons you know for on a personal level i like him but then i think also just what what he represents in a way uh it's nice to just have A non-geriatric boomer on a major party ticket. I think he's the first millennial on a major party ticket. He's 39. He's young. He's got a wife and young kids. You know, there is that kind of youthful aura around him that you don't get from someone like Trump and definitely someone like Biden.

No, it's exciting. Yeah, and his book is great, too. I do recommend Hillbilly Algae. Yeah, I read that years before I wrote Troubled. And that was one of the books, that one and this other book that I had read by another young person, educated by Tara Westover. Yeah, those two books did get me sort of... slowly on the path of thinking, okay, you know, these two young people who had very difficult lives wrote these amazing books, maybe I could

do something like that um that's really cool yeah yeah that's very cool okay i want to get i want to get into psychology a bit oh but first before we do that you filmed a course for peterson academy i did yeah And we just showed you the trailer. What did you think? When you suggested we watch the trailer, I was nervous.

I'm like, oh, I'm going to be embarrassed. It's always hard, for me at least, to watch myself on camera. But as soon as you started playing, I'm like, whoa, this is really good. I wanted to share it right away. And, yeah, the style, the cinematography, the music. I think I mentioned, you know, it sounded like it was scored by Hans Zimmer. Like, I watched some of the other trailers. It looks...

Yeah, it looks cinematic in the quality. So, yeah, I'll be one of the first to sign up for it. I'm glad you liked it. Your course, I've seen, I haven't watched the whole course. This is like eight hours of content. i haven't i haven't done it but we've watched a lot of your course your course is really good it's really good psychology of status yeah psychology of social status and yeah yeah they did six lectures and

Yeah, I mean, it's a naturally interesting topic. I love psychology. You know, I love sort of delving into this topic. I think that in polite society, we try to shy away from this idea of prestige and being. well-regarded by other people. And this is a topic that psychologists like to study and delve into. And so I figured, okay, let's surface some of this. Yeah, it was a lot of fun taking that course. Okay, good. Well, we're glad to have you on board. Yeah.

That was great. It was great. So, okay, for your psychology background, I want to ask you some relationship questions. What's your perspective on the rise of non-traditional relationship models? Do you think that people are moving towards polyamory? Or is that just one subsect of society? What are your views on that? You know, I saw this article in The New Yorker. Six months ago, maybe. And it said something like, you know, oh, the rise of Polly.

I read the whole article. Not once did they cite a single statistic. It was like citing like TV shows and Netflix and movies and books. You know, there was that memoir by the, they called her the Park Slope Mom, who wrote about her experiences in a poly marriage. But I'm like, where's the data? You know, I'm a psychologist. I'm a social scientist. I want to know, like, what does the survey data say? Are there sort of shifts in the trend lines over time generationally? Are there any differences?

I haven't seen anything like that. I saw one. I saw one poll maybe a year and a half ago, which did suggest among Zoomers Gen Z that some of them are more open to this. But I don't know. Like, I don't know if this is just a fad, if it's fleeting. Yeah.

At least among the young people I interact with, it doesn't really seem... It seems like a subculture, and maybe it's always been that way, that kind of subculture, where only now we're just hearing more about it. Most young people, it seems to me, do still want a kind of... conventional relationship. You know, pair bond as the evolutionary psychologists call it, one person who they're committed to and who they know is committed to them.

Are there any statistics that's showing for a subset of people, non-monogamous relationships work? Or is that just what some non-monogamous people say? I'm not familiar with any stats on that question of what are the predictors of a successful non-monogamous relationship. My guess is that there probably are. Human variation is fascinating and complex, and I'm sure there are people who can make it work.

I know at least one couple who seems to at least be making a go of it and seems like it's working for them. For those types of people, they are psychologically atypical. They're on the tail ends of multiple bell curves. They tend to be very smart. You know, IQ, in terms of IQ, they tend to be... conscientious, high impulse control, well-educated. Conscientious, really? Yeah, you know, high in resources, so sort of educated, high socioeconomic status. And I think...

For those types of people, they can navigate the complexities of multiple relationships and side marriages or side relationships in their marriage. But I think for most people who don't... score highly on all of those things and who aren't particularly high in socioeconomic status and so forth.

It can be jealousy and betrayal and all of those feelings that arise. I think that's very hard. That's hard to deal with for anyone. But if you are an unusual person, you can find a way maybe to make that work. But I just don't like it. To me, I coined this term luxury beliefs, which I think you and I talked about last time. This to me is kind of a luxury belief where if you are

you know, very well off, very well educated, you have money, you have all these things going for you, then you can kind of experiment and do, I think it's the same thing with drug use. There are people who can experiment with drugs and enjoy it. It won't. completely destroy their lives but

A lot of those people, more and more of them, it seems, suggest, well, all of us should do drugs. We should all shoot up heroin and, you know, decriminalize all hard drugs and so on because they, you know, in this kind of... self-centered way i think well i can do it so anyone can do it and that's just not the case yeah

So you think decriminalization is a bad idea? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Of hard drugs. Marijuana, it's kind of tricky because it's already, like, you know, de facto decriminalized in, like, most states, de jure in many states. But yeah, I mean, I think the idea of decriminalizing like crack and heroin and meth and all those things, that would be a huge mistake. And in fact, Oregon recently learned this, right? In 2020, Oregon decriminalized all drugs in the wake of the defund the police movement.

And then overdoses skyrocketed, deaths as a result of drug use. A lot of the cities, a lot of the parts of Portland became these kind of... open-air drug dens. And a couple of months ago, they recently reintroduced legislation to recriminalize drug use. So it was a failed experiment. It sounds nice on paper, but it doesn't work. That's interesting.

I feel like my view on that's changed. I think originally I probably had the naive view that kind of let people do whatever they want they'll be fine less government is better yeah but that that is me coming from like my perspective without understanding what somebody else would do in that type of situation. I feel like Vancouver went through something similar, right? Or at least amounts of drugs have been decriminalized.

I think in Vancouver, I don't know if you're familiar with this, and Vancouver's a mess. So I guess it doesn't work. Yeah, I mean, some of the proponents, they point to Portugal and some other isolated cases where it can work, but... I think there are sort of cultural differences, policy differences, all kinds of things that are going on there that, you know.

Yeah, it doesn't really seem to be effective. Because either way, people are going to suffer. If you criminalize drugs, yes, people are going to be arrested. People are going to be... harassed by law enforcement and so on but if you decriminalize it you're just going to increase the number of people who you know do enough drugs to the point where they destroy everything around them and end up dead on the street.

So it's, you know, which bad choice do we want, right? Which bad outcome? Yeah, yeah. If you guys are not filtering your air, it is the easiest thing. It's the laziest thing you can do to improve your health. I'm so gung-ho about this. I literally travel with an air purifier for hotels. Seriously. I've been talking about air purifiers for years, but I didn't realize how important they are until I stopped being able to think because of a very moldy house.

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slash products slash iadaptair dash large or select the size you want with code MP for 10% off. That is linked in the description and in the pinned comment. Enjoy the rest of this episode. Okay, so do you think that the red pill view that men are polyamorous, is that just a lie brought on by like some hopeful men that want that maybe or think they want that?

because i feel like there are people that they're like yes to you know go back in time and these high value men they had multiple wives and it worked and that's how we're supposed to be as men is that just That's just not true. So, you know, you mentioned earlier, like, is there data on the poly thing? So I remember this wasn't on if you're in a poly relationship, but the question was, this is from YouGov, would you be okay or open to a poly relationship?

And most people were against it, but the group that was most in favor of it were men, and especially young men. And so to me, that was perfectly intuitive. I posted it on Twitter, and people were like, yeah, no shit. Yeah, I know. But the question, I think it's complicated. You know, I take this kind of,

you know, a sweeping view of human history. You know, I studied a lot of evolutionary psychology in grad school, and you know this is like a very sort of potted summarized version of of human evolution but are ancestors, like the closest ancestors that we had with chimpanzees about six billion years ago.

They were most likely, their mating systems were probably quite similar to chimpanzees where you do have this kind of like dominant male who does most of the mating with most of the females and some of the other males can kind of get in there sometimes but it's usually one dominant male who gets most of the copulation.

at some point as we evolved into Homo sapiens and we became these sort of nomadic hunter-gatherer bands where we would sort of settle in one place and then hunt the animals and fish and sort of like dry up all the resources and move on to the next place and so on. During this period, humans became monogamous, more or less. Part of the reason for this seems to be that it's very hard for one man to recruit lots of wives when they can't stockpile resources.

And also because in order to successfully hunt large animals, you need the cooperation of your male allies. And if you're sleeping with all of the women, then they're not going to like, you know, just become harder. It's a coordination problem. And so the kind of implicit agreement among men was like, okay, well, we have to hunt animals. They were often at war with other sort of nearby bands and coalitions of hunter-gatherers.

And so the implicit agreement was like, okay, like it was almost like romantic communism. Like everyone gets fun. you know and i'm speaking that makes sense though that that definitely makes sense so at a certain point about 12 000 years ago there was the rise of agriculture um the agricultural revolution where suddenly we could have sort of stationary communities we built sort of civilizations

city-states and so on, we could stay in one place and we didn't have to move around so much. And this gave rise to kings and pharaohs and fiefdoms and powerful people, powerful men in particular, were able to amass large armies and create situations where they could stockpile lots of resources and thereby obtain a lot of lives. And so when these like red pill guys say like, oh, this is the natural thing of like, you know, you get lots of lives and that's just how things have always been there.

This is like a blip in human evolutionary history, because if you think about Homo sapiens, we've been roughly in the current modern version of Homo sapien form for about 300,000 years. And of that 300,000 years, about 97% of it was lived, like we humans were living in roughly monogamous Now, occasionally these hunter-gatherer groups, sometimes like one of the more high-status guys, might get two wives, but not much more than that. Usually it was just one.

But for 12,000 of those 300,000 years, Yeah, there were sort of these, I guess now we might call them poly or something, of like kings and pharaohs and emperors, lots of concubines and mistresses and so on. But that is a blip in terms of evolutionary history. And then at a certain point... roughly 2,000 years ago with the rise of Christianity, so I'm talking about in the Western world, monogamy sort of became reinforced and sort of reentered sort of Western culture as the norm.

all this is to say that like as human beings we have been like mostly monogamous with exceptions right like if you uh look at the ethnographies of anthropologists who visit um modern hunter-gatherer communities in parts of africa and south america like They have the same kind of relationship complexities and betrayals. People will get married, but there's sometimes philandering, sometimes cheating, these kinds of things.

they still have marriage. This is what I find interesting, is that independent in multiple cultures, marriage arose as a norm, right? It's not like marriage started somewhere and spread through. It was sort of independently this idea of a man and a woman coming together, committing to one another. raising children together, this is more or less a human universal.

That's good. Yeah. That feels right. Yeah. Let's talk about psychopaths for a sec. Sure. Are there anything, is there any recommendations you have for young women in how to identify psychopaths? All right.

How to identify psychopathic men. You know, it's funny, like, if you read the research on psychopaths and narcissists and people who score highly on the dark triad or the dark tetrad traits, they're kind of disturbing in a way because they're sort of superficially appealing in many ways, especially narcissists, but psychopaths too. And it's almost like if someone is too charming or too magnetic in a way that's almost in itself a sign that they may be high on those kinds of traits.

So if you like them too much? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. There was an interesting study a few years ago which found that, so they basically showed participants images of people making facial expressions and asked them, Which of these faces appears to be most authentic to you, most genuine in terms of its emotional expression?

and they found that, and the people who were making these expressions, the images that these participants were seeing, The researchers collected their scores on the dark triad and found that participants rated faces to be the most genuine, the faces of people who scored highly on dark triad traits. And in other words, the people who were probably less authentic were rated as the most authentic in terms of their facial expressions.

And often people who are high on these kinds of traits, they know that there are certain kinds of expressions they can make that are charismatic or they sort of over-exaggerate to look particularly genuine in order to win people over. So if you look at qualitative interviews of actual psychopaths, after they've committed a crime or something and they're interviewed by police or forensic psychologists. Now,

reveal how early on in their life they kind of recognized that they didn't feel emotions the way that other people did. And some of them will say things like, so I learned how to mimic emotions by watching movies. So they'll watch a movie, observe. what sadness looks like, some actress or something crying, then they would go to the mirror in their bathroom or something and then try to make that same face.

And interestingly, I think they're almost like the reason why they are often viewed as more genuine is because actors already exaggerate just a little bit for the viewer, for the camera. And then the psychopath is exaggerating the emotions of an exaggeration, right? Like they're imitating an imitation. And so it becomes even more of an exaggeration. And I think that may be why. So yeah, all of this is to say that I think like if someone is a little too...

Their personality is a little too strong and too magnetic and charismatic. That could be one marker. And then the other is like, you could sort of pay attention to their close relationship. Have they had any serious relationships in the past romantically? What are their relationships? like with their friends, with their family, with their parents. And often you'll find that people who are psychopathically oriented have a lot of difficulty with... maintaining prolonged social relationships.

They often have difficulty in their professional life. They can't stay in one job for too long. They're often very, like I mentioned, charismatic at first, but the longer you get to know them, the less likable they become over time. Gracias. Terrifying. I wonder if that's something that you also as a female just kind of need to learn eventually.

I mean, there are stats behind that young women have a harder time with that, right? It's harder to identify for them. Maybe you just have to get older. Well, I don't know if it's harder to identify for them, or is it more so that... more attractive yeah more attract and and it's harder to i think like um uh inhibit that attract attraction whereas once you have some experience you recognize those signs and you realize okay like i know that like this guy seems interesting but maybe

you know, this probably wouldn't go anywhere. And I think, like, guys have this too, right? Almost with, like, like with women who have narcissistic traits or other kinds of like sort of score highly on various personality conditions that men too can find certain kinds of women very alluring and then over time they... You know, they kind of learn to recognize those signs too. But yeah, I mean, I like... A good friend of mine, a psychologist, said that...

In any good drama, almost all of the characters have a personality disorder. And I think it's true. There's something so interesting about watching it. But once you sort of invite it into your life. Yeah. Yeah. That was hectic. Yes. Yeah. That's a good word. Succession. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. For. What advice would you give to someone struggling with dating in the modern world? Where do you start?

I mean, okay, I guess it would, I'll give some general advice. I was going to ask it male, female, but just generally, I think, you know, we live, in a world where, I mean, of course, we're image-driven, sort of evolutionarily speaking. We are looking for signs of physical attractiveness, but it seems to be sort of more pronounced now in the era of...

internet and social media and so on. So I think a very easy sort of first pass is to just physically try to look pretty good. And a lot of guys will ask me for advice and I'm like, you know, you could start with just like going to the gym, getting a haircut, getting some clothes that fit. You know, sort of very basic things. You know, you want all the wind blowing at your back. Don't introduce more obstacles than you have to.

So, yeah, I think physical appearance, you know, basic, basic fitness and those kinds of things. What else? Try to go into social activities and hobbies. and situations where you'll be around people who have the same kinds of interests as you, essentially, right? So if you like working out, you can do CrossFit.

reading joint book clubs. I just saw this study pretty recently that one of the strongest, and this is like, you know, maybe not exactly what we're optimizing for, but one of the strongest predictors of what's called, I think it's, no, no. the number of number of sex partners that a person has had highly correlates with extroversion and so you know we're not trying to um you know like okay that's what you want but that does suggest that like if you are interested in sort of

putting yourself in a position where someone might be romantically interested in you, even if you aren't naturally an extrovert, I think sort of putting yourself in more social environments. That in itself will get you sort of part of the way there. Your odds of meeting a romantic partner are essentially zero if you're sitting at home with your phone, but they go up to whatever 0.1% just by going outside, right? Like, you know, just sort of putting yourself in more social situations.

Make some friends. I think a lot of, so I'll speak more from the male perspective. I think a lot of guys, you know, they're like, oh, I just need to get a girlfriend. I just need, and I want to learn how to talk to girls. And what I'll tell them is, you don't need to learn how to talk to girls. You need to learn how to talk to people first, right? And so, like, go out and just have conversations. Like, don't be a shy, withdrawn person. Even if that's how you naturally are, try to...

Push against that and whatever. Have conversations with your Uber driver, with whatever customer service people, with your friends, like if you have friends. talk to them more often, call them up, just sort of exercise that muscle of being social, being sort of aware and engaged with the people around you. And that sort of over time will just, you can...

transition that ability into once you meet someone who you might find interesting, you'll be able to talk to them and not stress out about it. Do you think there are ways for people who are naturally Because, I mean, that's a personality trait, right? Just naturally being introverted.

Are there ways that people can train extroversion just by communicating with other people? Is it always going to be painful for those people or are they eventually going to get more extroverted? How does that work? That's interesting. That particular trait seems to be pretty stable across the lifespan. So some of the other big five traits, People tend to become more agreeable over time through their lifespan. They tend to be a little bit less neurotic over time, a little bit less open.

But for extroversion, my understanding is it kind of stays stable. I think like once you sort of reach maybe middle age or older, it does kind of decline somewhat. Um, But I think at the individual level, right, because this is sort of based on like broad aggregate statistics of large groups of people, but at the individual level, you as a person, I think you can find, unless you're like really, really introverted. I think you could probably find ways to train yourself out of it.

almost look at it like So there have been multiple studies on this topic of extroversion. How do people feel, how do introverts feel when you tell them in like a research situation to behave like an extrovert? Yeah, yeah.

Every single study I've ever seen, and there have been multiple on this, this is a replicated finding, Introverts who behave in an extroverted way when you ask them in advance so before they go out into the social scene or go talk to people you ask them to forecast how they'll feel how do you think you'll feel when we ask you to go out and do that and they always say it's gonna it's gonna suck like I don't want to do this like but you know I signed up for the study so I'll do it

So they predict it's going to suck. But then they go out and actually talk to people and behave in an extroverted way. start a conversation with a stranger or have an interaction with someone and then when you ask them how did you enjoy it they always enjoy it more than they expect

Interesting. And this is true, obviously, for extroverts. When you ask extroverts to behave in an extroverted way, they're always pretty happy. When you ask introverts to behave in an extroverted way, they are always pretty happy, always as strong, but most of the time pretty happy. Happier especially than they predict. And I think this makes sense, right? Like we are social creatures who evolved to be around people. And even the idea of like the modern idea of privacy, which I'm a fan of.

even that didn't really exist until very recently in history where if you look at small-scale traditional societies there's like almost no privacy like everyone knows what everyone else is up to and we kind of evolved in that kind of environment so that suggests that you can view extroversion and sociality. as similar, I think, for most people as going to the gym.

Um, even if you know, like even for people who have a routine and they know they like working out, there's always that little bit of like, do I really want to do this today? Like maybe I'll skip tomorrow.

But then you do it and you always feel better about it. And I think over time you can sort of train yourself to think about being social in that way. Like, okay, this is going to be a little awkward. But then you do it and you know you're going to feel good. So just go for it. Have you taken a personality test? Yeah, I took understanding myself. Yeah, yeah. And I took another one pretty recently. And yeah, so I've taken two tests. Were they both big five?

they're both big five yeah and one of them other one there's a hexaco model oh yeah okay honesty humility And then it was, like, the old school, like, Myers-Briggs stuff and, like, Enneagrams and all these other, like, you know, kind of weird personality things. Oh, I need to take the Hexaco one. I haven't. I've been true to my dad.

And I know that his doesn't have honesty and humility in there. I remember I tweeted something about the Hexaco model and your dad, he was a little skeptical. I think he's less skeptical now. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't want people to... i could be wrong i could be wrong here but i believe we had a conversation recently where he said yeah we are missing the uh because kind of the dark triad doesn't come out as easily in his big five model right yeah he said anyway

Yeah, on the big five, the dark triad, it's inversely correlated with agreeableness. So disagreeable people are usually pretty high on the dark triad. But then, yeah, the Hexaco model, the honesty, humility factor is is even more highly correlated inversely. So if you're very high on honesty and humility, you're low on dark triad. If you're high on dark triad, you're low on those two traits, honesty and humility. Do people just lie on that, though? Or, like, can't you just trick it?

Uh, well, you could, like, in theory, yes, but people don't seem to do that. I think, um... Because I remember I had this conversation with a professor who studies narcissism, and I asked, like, why wouldn't narcissists just, like, lie?

And his response was like, they like knowing that they're this way. And I think a lot of people in the dark track kind of, they don't want to be thought of as honest. They're like, honesty is for suckers. You know, like they like to say like, yeah, I'm not a humble, honest person. I'm a realist. I've met people like that where they're proud at the fact that they're good at manipulating

I was like, that's not something to be proud of. And they think that they are the realists and that everyone is out manipulating other people. and that everyone else is lying. They think that you're the liar for not scoring high on Dark Triad or high on Honesty and Humility, right? They think that they're the ones who are being honest when they do these tests. Wow. Yeah. So it's interesting, yeah. How do we know who's right? We know. We know on a soul level. I think we know. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

people are crazy okay what was the what was the strangest thing for you about leaving kind of like the blue collar while like troubled situation you were in and going somewhere like

Was that a bit of a shock? Yeah. I mean, it's funny. So people kind of think of you as like the last thing that you were or like the last thing you did. And so by the time I got to Cambridge, You know, I was in grad school doing a PhD and like, you know, the conversations would kind of Arise and one of the first questions is like what do you do undergrad? And I did undergrad at Yale. And so people just assumed like, oh, you're like, you know, you were groomed to go to Cambridge. Yeah.

But then when I was at Yale, that was really the culture shock. I was going from the military into Yale. And, you know, I spent two chapters. dwelling at length on the culture shock I had um at Yale it was it was a little bit of a culture shock at Cambridge as well but um you know after after doing undergrad it was less so so yeah it was it was tough I mean

for a lot of reasons. It was difficult academically. I was a horrible high school student. I went to this college and... all the other students many of them have been training their whole lives to go to a place like that they went to private schools private tutors everything going for them And the coursework was actually quite rigorous. A lot of people, when they study psychology, they think of it as like this...

I don't know, like this kind of abstract, unserious, like, oh, people just sort of navel-gazing or something. But psychology, especially if you do like research methods and statistics and sort of empirical stuff, it can get pretty dense. And I was taking neuroscience courses too. And so that first semester, that first year, academically, I struggled a lot.

until I sort of found my footing. And this is another, to go back to the earlier point, that just because you have the intrinsic ability, if it's not nurtured and cultivated properly, the person can still struggle and have setbacks.

then there was the cultural component of you know like the students and a lot of the professors and administrators and grad students they just had so little familiarity with the people who they claimed to care about, marginalized people, poor people, prison inmates, so on and so forth, where, you know, they just...

They've never had a 15-minute conversation with someone who doesn't have a bachelor's degree. They just have no idea what life is like outside of that environment. So interacting with people like that over and over, like decriminalizing drugs or defunding the police and these kinds of...

ideas decarceration just release all the prisoners like you know it's it's not um what is it like they're they're in prison and it just makes them worse criminals or something like It was just a lot of sort of naivete that I had to get used to. Yeah. But over time, I was able to sort of find my footing and find friends and stuff. But yeah, that first year was really rough. Yeah. Did people argue with you?

Yeah. I lost friends. I lost friends. I were like friends in quotes because, you know, so I entered Yale in 2015 and that was kind of like the start of like when. whatever political correctness or wokeness started to spill out of the universities. And... So, yeah, I would argue with students about like, I mean, so for example, I grew up thinking like the word racism just meant like mistreating people based on the color of their skin.

or their ethnicity yeah and then suddenly i get to yale and racism got like got like redefined through verbal trickery into like what did they say? Like power plus prejudice or some, basically like only white people can be racist. And I was like, whoa, this is a new one. Okay. And then like, I tried multiple times to get people to explain this to me because It didn't really make sense. And then, you know, people just got upset with me. If you even question these things,

Often, you know, people, they didn't learn how to defend their views because everyone around them agrees with them. And so once someone does, it, like, activates this, like, threat. Oh, okay, well, we can't talk to you anymore. Wow. I went to university slightly before that. I quit though. I was at Concordia, just like no-name university in Montreal, and it was woke in 2000, I think it was 2012. It was already woke, so I kind of entered into that.

It was an art school, so I think it got infiltrated first, and Montreal's in rough shape right now. But it was woke, so I was taking classics, and then I was suddenly in the classics course. through a feminist lens okay it was like that's not what i signed up for it was like homer i was studying homer through a feminist perspective and was like What? What is this? And I had to leave that university because it was so bad.

It was crazy. My psychology courses were terrible too. Like the psychology professor. I think part of the reason I was like we need an online university where like things are taught properly. My psychology professor told us rats weren't social creatures.

because they lived in cages i'm not even joking that was my first year psychology class that i had to travel like an hour to i was like what you know like a dungeon wow it's like oh i mean like okay so you put a human in a cage and oh humans are like that's that's that's crazy yeah yeah i mean it wasn't just like the wokeness that i saw even like

So to give an example of something weird and peculiar that wasn't really woke or political in any way, I remember in one of my psychology classes, we learned of this study where... It was a moral psychology course, and... It was about sort of cultural differences in moral psychology, people's intuitions about right and wrong. And one of the scenarios in the study that was presented to participants was this case of incest.

between a brother and sister, is this wrong? And this was almost a universal, where in countries like India and Brazil and in the U.S., kind of universally, people said that this was wrong. There was one exception. One group, they were more likely to say incest was okay versus not okay, and these were students at elite universities.

and when i learned i read this study which was done in the 90s and so you know this is about 20 years later i'm at yale and so i decided to just like ask classmates and friends i'm like Yeah, so I read the scenario or just recall it from memory of just this brother and sister who are interested in each other. no chance of pregnancy, but they're romantically attracted. And most students said yes. They said no one's getting hurt, no one's suffering, and they both want to do it.

why not? And I'm like, whoa, like, okay, like, it's so obvious that this is not okay. But it was this very sort of individualistic, if it feels good, do it, if no one's getting hurt, that kind of thing. Yeah, just a very different kind of moral vision, I guess, than I was used to. That's interesting. So would that be classified as a luxury belief? I don't know if I'd classify it as a luxury belief, but I do think it's...

It's like the type of person who would say that that's okay would also almost certainly say that things like poly. or drug use or like anything that if you want to do it and at least at the surface level without doing any kind of in-depth analysis if you know things kind of everyone's consenting and everyone's okay and everyone feels like you know they're enjoying it then don't interfere. It's sort of tied in with the undergirding luxury belief proclivity, yeah. Interesting.

I feel like I was definitely more like that. i think so too like i like i i definitely I definitely was. But it's naive. Yeah, I think that's one thing that older people don't do a great job of doing is sort of challenging that kind of... naivete because I felt that way too when I was younger and a lot of the kind of conventions and

enduring principles and norms over time. People forget why they're there and how to defend them in the first place. Young people come along and we think that we know everything. It takes a while, I think, to sort of mature out of it. The universe has to wallop you a bunch of times until you learn. You're like, okay, I know nothing.

That's good. Okay, do you know anything about how hookup culture... because i know a lot of especially gen z's because it's gotten worse it was already bad enough when i was in university and i know it's gotten worse do you know the long-term impacts of that

of hookup culture i think my sense is that it's actually declining um okay that's my sense too but is it possible that i mean you know the statistics but is it possible that we're just in an echo chamber of like hope um no i well Or are people more against it now? I think we're both millennials. And I remember when I was younger, and this is just anecdotal. I don't know the statistics on this, but this is just maybe helps to illuminate this.

pattern we may be seeing is like 10-15 years ago people would hang out right like do you want to hang out do you want to like whatever like go to this and thing and and just go for hangs and then the hang would turn into a hookup I'm noticing more and more Zoomers will refer to, like, They'll talk about dates. They'll actually say, I went on a date. Or like, yeah, I'm going to go on a date, or will you go on a date with me? And this seems to actually be coming back a little bit.

Again, just sort of observational, anecdotal. But I remember there was this reluctance. Calling something a date felt weird or awkward or icky or something. uh, 15 years ago. And now it's like, yeah, you go on a date, like hookups are the thing that that's kind of like not cool now, or just kind of like weird or cringe or something. And all that being said, like I do. Yeah. It does seem like.

a lot more young people just aren't doing anything. Like, they're just not having sex at all. And you've probably seen some of these stats, like the sex recession and this kind of stuff. So, you know, something weird I think is happening where some people I think are trying to like revive some version of monogamous dating.

Others are just sort of checking it all together. And there's always going to be like a very small percentage of the population that would score high on what psychologists call like the sociosexual inventory, which basically is just how promiscuous you are. And there's like 10% of the population that is extremely high on this trait for both men and women. And most of the promiscuity actually takes place among that group.

And everyone else sort of mistakenly believes that that's happening everywhere. But it's really just like that 10% of the population hooking up with each other. And so... Yeah, the hookup thing. Yeah, it seems to be... waning a little bit I know more young people seem to be abandoning the apps a lot of them are like frustrated with them but I think a lot of them are just like having trouble because there's there's not a lot of alternatives either so yeah

I've been trying to think about what the alternative is. I guess people figured out that the apps didn't really work. A lot of childless women. started experiencing unhappiness and telling people about it. I remember growing up, and I was definitely told, and I don't think people are told this anymore, but I was definitely told that you could have kids. Until you were like I don't know 45 or 50 like like old and it was I think that was before

These women who didn't have kids reached that age and then realized they couldn't and then told everybody else about it. So I feel like the lies kind of unfolded. Like I think celebrities are talking about how, oh, I, you know, I was one of those people that. was told i could have kids when i was 45 and i can't

So maybe that's part of the reason it's going away is because people are realizing it's a lie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I think we're like starting to like the younger generation are kind of witnessing. sort of like older millennials who went through this because like yeah like hookup culture was huge and it was sort of praised like if you go back and read articles in places like the atlantic in like 2010 it was like

Hookup culture is great for women. Hookup culture is great for everyone. We all win. Why do we need to be so committed to this old, outdated model of relationships? So I just wrote this post on my substack about how, you know, people... believe that we have evolved sort of beyond arranged matchmaking. And the argument I made in this essay was that universities are essentially like the new matchmaking systems.

you know, they basically sort people, you know, okay, so I gave this thought experiment in the essay where I said, you know, imagine there's an upper middle class, older married couple, they have an 18-year-old kid, and they want to identify suitable partners, and so they ask, potential suitors okay, we want you to take an IQ test and tell us your score. We want you to go out and gather recommendation letters.

We want you to write a personal statement about your background and your values. We want you to give us the financial statement of your parents so that we know how much money they make. So on and so forth. And now you have a pool of all this information. And now you know, OK, you can put your kid with these other young people based on this information. And then from there, they can kind of figure it out. And that's basically what college is.

Most people don't actually meet their spouse in college or university, but by going to a place like that, you become a part of this. strata of society where you go to college and you go into this kind of white collar job where almost everyone around you and everyone you ever interact with has a college degree. And you enter this kind of refined dating pool over time. And then if you go on to grad school, this continues to occur. So there's this stat.

that I share there where if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, your likelihood of marrying someone with a college degree is only 9%. But if you have a college degree, your likelihood of marrying someone with a college degree is 65%. And that study was done in 2005. My guess is it's even higher now. And social scientists call this assortative mating, where people...

tend to pair with individuals who are similar to themselves along sort of educational lines, but also sort of political lines and personality and so on. And so, yeah, I think... a lot of young people actually no one tells them this right like everyone thinks oh colleges to get a degree colleges to study colleges to prepare for my career but you're also in this

you're in a unique environment that will never be replicated again, where you're literally around tons of other young people, same age as you. you know, roughly the same academic level, same interests, all these things. And a lot of young people will tell me they're shocked. You know, they graduate college, go into the workforce, and they tell me, like, they're shocked at, like, how their dating pool has dramatically shrunk.

right because now you're in a you're at work you're in an organization where like you have like older bosses everyone around like most of the time everyone's older than you right when you're fresh out of college and you have your first job and you're not around lots of interesting young people potential partners and so

Toward the end, I suggest, if you're a young person reading this, think harder about that, about when you're in college, about finding someone more serious in that kind of environment. That's smart. I never understood the value of private school. I went to a public school, and it was a mess.

I went to a whole bunch of different public schools and they were all messes. And I didn't, I kind of had this negative view about private school. Like why would anyone pay that much money to put their kid in a private school? And then I grew up and. I went to university and I met a couple of people that had been in private school and I realized that their friends were different than my friends in public school and i was like oh i get it

Maybe part of the reason parents put their kids in private school is so they're surrounded by these other kids that are from richer families that have these different experiences. I had never thought about that as a kid. I was just like, why would you?

spend that much money on a school what does that matter but it is that social group is so important i didn't think about that with university because usually i'm like it's a bad idea it's not going to get you a job and i still think it's a bad idea for the most part but that that is interesting that you

take yourself out of wherever you're in and put yourself in a different, I guess, status situation. Yeah, you're not really paying. Well, okay, maybe you're paying for an education, but yeah, you're really paying. for yourself or for your kid to be around uh you know potentially more um you know attractive and and people who will basically um

give rise to healthy grandchildren, form long-term relationships, put them in a situation where the grandkids can be successful, that kind of thing. So I think there is something. something to that i don't know if parents consciously have that thought but like probably some of them do yeah i think people who put their kids in private schools do I think. I don't know. That's what I've thought anyway. I have, like, my daughter's in a private...

I was like, now that I can afford it, I get it. The kids here are different than the kids in public school. I've seen that. Sneaky. Okay. I can get behind that for university, I guess. Maybe. Well, Rob, thank you for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, this has been great. Yeah, that was fun. Thanks for trekking over here. And I would recommend this. I'm going to link it in the description and everything. Troubled, Rob Henderson.

depressing but but like but wild and you should no but i mean people should be aware of that that other human beings experience that kind of thing yeah and and like there are i mean we we dwell on some of the impressive parts but there are some there are moments of levity and humor and some other things in there but um You know, the early chapters are pretty rough going, I will say. Well, congratulations and thank you for coming on again. Thanks, Michaela.