What are some examples of that?

One example would be this fashionable view that hard work doesn't matter.

You know, there's the last few years, these attacks on meritocracy of, you know, it's not really about work or effort, it's about connections.

And, you know, a lot of the people who propagate this belief, you know, students and graduates of elite universities, professors at elite universities, they themselves work incredibly hard.

They're well aware that it is the case that hard work does not always guarantee success.

But if someone is successful, in almost every case, they worked very hard to get there.

Even if there were connections and luck and all these other things that went along with it, they still had to work very hard to get there.

Can you unpack that for us?

Why don't you talk a little bit about-

Yeah Yeah.

Well, by the way, the, the trailer for Confession looks fantastic.

I'm really looking forward to watching it.

Uh, there aren't enough films, I think, about that, ah, period of history.

I mean, one other is, I, I thought it was like Mr. Jones, but there are just, you know, shockingly few, ah, ah, films, ah, depicting the, the horrors of kind of the, the shocking manipulative tactics and the mind games that, uh, the communists would play to extract, ah, you know, mostly false confessions.

So I'm really looking forward to the film.

... of personality ar- around this particular case, and then treated that as sort of the way that you were to move ahead in the Stalin system, was inform on your parents, inform on your kids, inform on your neighbors, and this would give you, you know, the, the thing that you couldn't get through capitalist enterprise, it would give you a status in your community.

Mm-hmm.

Um, I never, you know, uh, when I was a kid, I, growing up in the foster homes in Los Angeles, I had a teacher when I was in second grade ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said a scientist.

And then she was well aware of my, um, lack of focus in school.

I was changing schools and foster homes all the time.

And, but I told her I wanted to be a scientist, and she was like, "Well, if you're gonna be a scientist, you gotta learn how to read." And I was, you know, barely knew the alphabet.

I was just a really, um-

Uh, end here with your top tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives.

All right.

How did you become a writer? How did you get into this world thing of ours, as I like to say?

uh this thing of ours isn't that the that's what the mafia is um well it's a long story i'll try to keep it brief um i never you know when i was a kid i growing up in the foster homes in los angeles i had a teacher when i was in second grade asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up and i said a scientist and then she was well aware of my lack of focus in school.

I was changing schools and foster homes all the time.

And when I told her I wanted to be a scientist and she was like, well, if you're going to be a scientist, you got to learn how to read.

And I was, you know, barely knew the alphabet.

I was just a really...

My academic aptitude was kind of underdeveloped.

you are a military veteran.

I don't know any-

Yeah.

No, I, I, um, I'm glad that other people connected with that and understood where I was coming from.

You know, I'm, I'm always grateful when anyone reads anything I write, but all the more so when someone who can understand where I'm truly coming from has kind of a similar background and the same kind of experience with social mobility, where suddenly you're in this completely different social environment.

And I'm, yeah, I'm...

This was in 2015.

I get to Yale after, you know, growing up in foster homes.

Sorry for cutting you off.

So maybe this is better aligned with the desires of the users than the commercial product.

Yeah, but the incentives are different here, right? So, uh, Hinge and Tinder, they make money when their users continue to swipe and continue to stay on the app and, and then upgrade.

You know, there's like the p- the freemium model, where you upgrade to get access to more matches or, uh, change your location and all these kinds of things, and so they want you to stay, whereas, you know, as you said, so with the government, they, it's almost the reverse, where they would save money w- with people who aren't using the app when they do get married and have children, when they get off of the app.

Uh, so you have the sort of the, the, the Hinge model, where they're motivated to keep users, and the government model, where they're motivated to, to, you know, get the users to not use their platform.

Uh, so it'll be interesting.

I mean, in a way it's, uh, I guess, uh, one way to think about it is, like, you have the free market versus state-sponsored game theory.

Um, so you know, you have, like, the, the, the tech bros in Silicon Valley developing their apps, and then you have the Singaporean government using, uh...

I don't think the answer therefore is socialist revolution.

But they are the people that are pushing these beliefs like anything you're not thrilled about is abuse you don't need a husband the governmental system is there there's no shame in using it they just would never do those things themselves and if you call this out they'll say well it's just not for me i date who i like like there's a set of pat phrases there but the the idea and i think you said this later on in trouble the idea trickles down right so last line but i mean beyonce wrote a whole series of songs back when most all three of us were probably going out a little more like single ladies irreplaceable don't need him and i mean independent woman yeah ind yeah that that was the most famous of them right but there's another one no pigeons or someone else no scrubs the whole thing with that though is like Beyonce Beyonce lives in a castle with Jay-Z they're married once but it's a very loving marriage so there's that's the contrast I think writing irreplaceable single girl while living in your husband's mansion

Yeah, no, I remember I was reading this.

This was way back in the day.

Some I guess is maybe probably like a like a proto type of like the manosphere era, like the blog era of the early 2010s is a black male writer who said something like, I think this was right around the time Jay-Z and Beyonce got married.

But he had this very funny observation, which was that if you want to understand women, just know that Beyonce spent her whole career talking about being an independent woman and not taking any shit from any man.

And then she ended up marrying a guy who rapped about turning tricks and having a lot of hoes and running a harem.

He was not the gentleman that women often claim that they want.

So what's your take on this, Rob? How are we going to continue breeding?

I mean, that-

The sort of deregulation- of romantic relationships, whereas in the past it was expected for you to have one partner and over time settle down, whereas now it's a total free-for-all.

I mean, there are aspects to this that a lot of people don't think about.

I mean, I talk to young people, so I have younger friends who I talk to who are sort of very active on the apps and in sort of the dating scene.

They'll tell me things like it's even easier to cheat.

So in the past, if you wanted to be unfaithful to your partner, it was risky because, you know, essentially like you had the same social circle, you had the same friends, everyone knew everyone else.

But now with the apps, you can match with someone who is completely outside of your social reality.

Has there been research on the relationship between the dark triad and these hyper successful men?

This particular expression, woke one was crazy, said with a dismissive laugh, has been the subject of much discussion and I think is fascinating as a way of dealing with this history.

Yeah, no, I got a lot of attention online because that was her way of trying to slip slipping out of having to answer for what happened and her role in it.

I mean, she was all in on defund the police.

She had the pronouns in her Twitter bio.

She was.

100 percent in on the woke movement in 2020.

And I believe it was in that same interview, Louise, where she was asked by the interviewer, you know, something like, you know, you were in favor of defunding the police, too.

He has some democratic legitimacy, yes.

Yeah.

Um, and so now you have, uh, you know, with dating apps, online dating, people can meet each other more easily.

We are, um, you know, supposedly placing more value on looks as a result of social media and dating apps and so on.

So the story was, and we saw some statistical trends that supported this notion, at least initially, that, uh, a small percentage of men were getting the majority of female attention, and that men on, sort of on the lower end of, uh, mate value were getting, uh, increasingly less, uh, female interest.

And so the story was, what was it? Like 20% of men are getting 80% of the attention.

There was some truth to that, at least with regard to sort of, um, uh, match rates and swipe rates on Tinder and so on.

But, uh, if you look at the actual data, you dig into it and, and, you know, more statistics and findings have come out since, uh, you and I have had those discussions a few years ago, suggest that actually that story isn't completely true.

Yeah.

What do you make of that characterization?

well there's a danger here with that kind of research which is that i like with anything you can discover a new finding and it can explain a great deal of the differences between individuals but then i think people will over extrapolate and think okay well this explains everything um so yeah something like your polygenic score or your parent socioeconomic status or your level of intelligence or personality traits.

Oh, well, this explains it.

Oh, this person is more successful than that person.

Well, it's impulse control.

Well, it's how much money their parents had.

Well, they were endowed with certain genes that led them to be that way.

Oh,

Rob, I think that you sort of went hunting from some of the links in this article on whether millennials really are at a disadvantage financially.

Yeah.

They, they linked to, uh, the US Government Accountability Office.

I, you know, I, I flagged this because I've seen data suggesting that millennials are doing just fine, and the way that this article is written, it's intended, I think, to convey that millennials are really struggling.

And maybe, you know, the millennials in these vignettes, you know, these individuals this journalist speaks with, uh, in this article, they're struggling in a sense, I suppose.

But generally, millennials are doing just fine.

And even the link to the USGAO that they, that they cite, it says that millennial households were more likely than other, other generations to be college educated.

Although an influential subset, but small, yeah.

I mean,

that...

Sort of deregulation... of romantic relationships, you know, whereas in the past it was expected for you to have one partner and over time settle down.

Whereas now it's a total free for all.

I mean, there are aspects to this that a lot of people don't think about.

I mean, I talk to young people, so I have younger friends who I talk to who are sort of very active on the apps and in sort of the dating scene.

And they'll tell me things like it's even easier to cheat.

Has there been research on the relationship between the dark triad and these hyper successful men?

luxury.

Right.

And the basic idea here is that historically elites exhibited their status, their high social rank with luxury goods, expensive material possessions.

And now material goods are a noisier signal of social status.

Now we live in an age where anyone could get an iPhone.

You can go to certain outlets and buy expensive clothes or clothes that used to be expensive off the rack.

And so compared to 100 years ago, you look around, who's rich, who's poor, it's harder to identify by appearance alone.

Do you remember when you first sort of made this connection of this, when this concept became something real in your mind?

Tell us, uh, either one of those books, uh, Troubled, um, and/or Life at the Bottom, whichever comes first.

Uh, w- well, uh, you know, Troubled came first.

Uh, it was a, a book that was released a little more than two years now.

It's a memoir of my unusual experiences.

Uh, grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and, um, you know, it was a lot of, a lot of adversity, a lot of difficulty.

Um, you know, seven different foster homes in LA, and then I was adopted by this working class family, and we settled into this town in Northern California where...

And this was the late '90s, and as a kid, I got this front row seat into the ongoing kind of fragmentation and deterioration of life in, um, blue collar, low income working class neighborhoods all across the country.

Yeah

Um, tell us your thoughts on all of these big debates that we're having now, and they're emerging on X.

Yeah.

Well, it's fascinating there because if, if you go back to the beginning of when those, uh...

Yeah, yeah, when those charts were, were...

Yeah, in the 1980s, right? So for women, you know, they're almost identical, 65% for conservatives versus 60% for liberal women.

Um, and then the, this has just grown over time.

You know, people talk about polarization and how we're growing further apart along political lines.

Why are we experiencing all of this, this disconnect, this asymmetry?

Um, tell us your thoughts on all of these big debates that we're having now, and they're emerging on X.

Yeah.

Well, it's fascinating there because if you go back to the beginning of when those, uh...

Yeah, yeah, when those charts were, were...

Yeah, in the 1980s, right? So for women, you know, they're almost identical, 65% for conservatives versus 60% for liberal women.

Um, and then the, this has just grown over time.

You know, people talk about polarization and how we're growing further apart along political lines.

Why are we experiencing all of this, this disconnect, this asymmetry?

Why are we experiencing all of this disconnect, this asymmetry?

Well, you know, it's a good question.

I think one important reason here.

Well, you know, people ask, well, why aren't women having as many children as they used to have or why is the fertility rate declining? Sometimes it's helpful to reverse a question, which is, you know, why? Why would women want children in the first place? Why have they historically had children? And I think part of it was they had a culture in place that valorized motherhood, that, you know, in many cultures you were not considered a full-fledged contributing member of that community as a woman until you had children.

And this was celebrated motherhood, whereas now we live in a society where... one way to look at it, we're egalitarian, where whether you want to have children, if you don't want to have children, those are equally valid options.

Another way to look at it is that we're actively punishing motherhood, that not having children is valorized, that prioritizing your career or being a girl boss or something like that is the more celebrated option.

And when young people, young women hear a message like that, they absorb it and you know, decide to delay and and maybe even decide not to have children at all.

I don't know how you turn it around, but I don't know if the men have to link arms in this giant uprising and take back some ground here or what's going to ultimately give way because it's unsustainable on some level.

Okay, Rob, shall we start with you just explaining your column this week, and we can u- we can use that as a, as a jumping-off point to talk about the topic?

Yeah.

Well, I wrote this piece, uh, for Wall Street Journal summarizing this paper.

Uh, I came across it, uh, recently.

So the, the title of the paper, it's in, uh, Politics and the Life Sciences.

The title of this paper, it's an academic paper, "Toward Individualistic Reproduction: Solving the Fertility Crisis Could Require a Further Marginalization of Men." It was an interesting title, so I read this paper and, like, like many papers by social scientists, it gets the diagnosis correct, but then the solutions it offers, you know, quickly, in my view, went off the rails.

So essentially, this paper points out, you know, the fertility, uh, decline, and I'm sure many of your listeners are aware of this, especially in developed countries, that, um, birth rates are crashing.

Yeah.

Rob Henderson, it's a pioneering moment, isn't it? It's a pioneering therapy.

Yes, it's very exciting.

We are lucky to have, um, this is the first and only at the moment, um, ocular gene therapy.

From 2019 onwards, we've been, uh, able to treat, uh, patients with this, uh, particular gene, and, uh, what we've been showing in our most recent r- uh, research is that actually treating younger children, uh, we get results that are actually better than were in the original published research.

And how, how do you actually do it? How do you do gene therapy?

So, uh, in this particular instance, we're trying to treat the retina.

The retina is the film in the back of the camera, if you like.

It's, um...

What do you make of that?

Right.

Well, you know, this is the sort of the consent-based, uh, morality of, you know, modern, secular, progressive kind of culture, where, you know, as long as everyone agrees to it, if there's a tacit, uh, uh, understanding, then anything goes.

Um, but of course, you know, th-this is, uh, you know, it can erode relationships, uh, you know, a, a lot of the, the ideas that the manosphere peddles.

One example of this, and, you know, when I, when I wrote about this piece recently in The Wall Street Journal, there were sort of multiple layers of contradictions and hypocrisy.

So one of them was that, uh, these guys, the sort of the, the bedrock foundation of their framework is, uh, women are born with innate value and men are not, which, you know, there's a grain of truth to that.

But when they say, "Oh, women are born with innate importance and value," uh, and then they, uh, immediately contradict this by telling their followers to mistreat women.

It seems like that undermines a lot of the main points that the right has to make generally.

Like, honestly, I, I- ch- it's, it's a mental illness that would make you look at your adorable, sweet, innocent children and say, "What, what can I do to make child molesters more plentiful in my community?"

Hmm.

I mean, uh, a lot of these demonstrators and protesters also seem to play this game where they will highlight, uh, you know, oh, uh, uh, children or, or women or, you know, people who, uh, uh, are, are innocent, but then they are more than willing to come out in support of people, uh, you know, uh, uh, criminals, uh, people who are breaking the law.

And I, I think there's probably this fear that if they give in on the idea that, that criminal, illegal immigrants should be deported, then the next step will be, um, you know, widespread deportation.

So they feel like they have to sort of hold the line for criminal immigrants, uh, because once they cede that point, which, which they would- you know, they're, they're going to lose on.

Um, you know, the vast majority of Americans want, uh, uh, criminal illegal immigrants to be deported.

Uh, then they fear, "Okay, well, then they're going to go for everyone else." But, you know, there's a kind of a subversive element to, to a lot of these protesters, where they...

... because the only people being charged under the Klan Act today are the people who are on their side, who stormed and terrorized a church.

The next question comes from a person who may be familiar to you, Erica, because Charlie interviewed him for his show last August, Rob Henderson to you.

Thank you, Bari.

And thank you Erica.

Um, during that discussion with Charlie, uh, neither of us knew that was going to be the last long form interview he would ever conduct because his life was cut short by the actions of a very disturbed young man.

As someone who admired Charlie's ability to offer young people a productive and optimistic path, I wanted to ask, how should the conservative movement think about cultivating leaders and role models for young men and how can it continue offering them a constructive alternative to the toxic currents Charlie so astutely criticized?

So where is the self-interest in this?

Uh, well, it's, it's interesting because in a lot of progressive spaces, the hierarchies have been sort of inverted.

And now the way that you can obtain status is essentially by, by calling out your own privilege, right? So it's not as if Robin D'Angelo has, um, I mean, she's, she's essentially getting wealthy by talking about how privileged she is, uh, which is, which is a pretty nice racket, right? So you can just sort of tell people, oh, you know, I'm a white person and I have to atone for this, that, and the other, and you as a white person do as well.

But the white people that she's berating aren't earning money from book sales and workshops and public speaking gigs and so on.

She is.

And this happens.

I've seen this at elite universities where white progressives will talk about how privileged they are.

don't want to make you say you've changed your mind

Is this a luxury belief using your nomenclature?

Yeah.

I, I think it's almost there.

So I listened to this very interesting discussion by this evolutionary behavioral scientist, Dani Sulikowski, um, and she's been, you know, done, she's done a few interviews on this, on this question of reproductive suppression.

And one thing she points out is a lot of this anti-natalist messaging comes from, uh, elite institutions, people with platforms, journalists and academics and corporate leaders of, you know...

I, I see this a lot in, um, social science journals, for example, uh, like, like the motherhood penalty, that kind of thing of, oh, if you have children, um, you're going to be penalized in the labor market.

Um, but you never see, uh, the reverse framing where, uh, if you choose to work and not stay with your kids, this is also a penalty in a way, because there's a limited window o- of your child's life where you, um, can spend a lot of time with them and where you're like literally the number one person, um, in their world.

Mm.