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c-span2 as a public service. >> my name is sally, a senior fellow here at aei and i have a feeling that many of are fans and a child welfare expert here at aei will fill in the wisdom through that outline. although wisdom you extracted from a very, very challenging upbringing. rob's mother struggled with addiction and she was deported back to south korea when was four years old and never saw her again. he spent 10 years in-- and he spent years in afoster homes and then he was adopted

and had a dad for the first time and that stability was shattered two years later when those parents divorced. and after that was a series of poor performance in school, a lot of vandalization with friends who were, unfortunately, often in the same position he was coming from unstable families. a lot of weed, a lot of fights, a lot of alcohol. but rob was a reader and he was curious and during his senior year in high school, a history teacher who had been in the airport himself encouraged rob to enlist. that teacher saw potential that according to rob, he hadn't, quote, yet discovered or maybe didn't even want to. so he was in the air force for eight years, enrolled at age 17 through the g.i. bill he went to yale to study psychiatry -- psychology.

i'm a psychiatrist, he studied psychology and made many astute observation there is and inspired his-- i guess your tag line, which is luxury beliefs and you continue to talk more about that with naomi, but basically, i particularly recommend chapters 10 and 11, which are his really transient observations of life in an ivy league university. everyone, if there are not enough books let me know afterwards and we can order more. and he graduated yale in 2018 and at 28, and then went on to cambridge in england to study psychology where he just received his ph.d. now he's 33 and looking back, rob writes in his book, until i was 17 years old, nearly everything in my hive was propelling me to a life of one of america's lost boys, the young male who fail to mature, do poorly in school, live on

the economic margins and become absentee fathers or fail to form stable families of their own. how did he diverge from that past and what are the insights he gleaned from hardship, intellect and temperament. that's what we're here to hear about and thank you so much for coming and looking forward to it. >> welcome, everyone. so, sally's given everyone the timeline and i want to start back and maybe put you on the couch and ask about your earliest memories, but particularly thinking about your time in foster care. what do you think was going wrong in those families, the early families that were you in and sort of looking back, what do you make of that dysfunction? >> well, so my -- you know, my birth mother and i, you know,

she was just hot in a position to care for me due to her addiction. never met my father. you know, i write in the book, i received a very thick document, you know, full of information from social workers and forensic psychologists and people involved in my case in los angeles. and in these reports they indicate that some police officers and others, you know, they asked my mother, where is this boy's father because you're not in a position to care for him and she didn't even know who he was. and she claimed that his name was robert, which is where i got my first name. and it wasn't until last year-- so last year i took a 23 and me genetic ancestry test, i'm half hispanic on my father's side and that's basically all i know

about that part of my family. then later in the foster system, you know, there was a lot of-- i mean, it's overburdened, overstressed. l.a.-- i recently read that l.a. might be sort of the worst sort of foster system in the country because there's a surplus of children who need homes and families who are able or willing to take them in. this is in the '90s. so if anything, things have probably gotten worse. i read the report in mpr that the number of children in foster care since 2000 have doubled. a lot of this is due to the crisis and drugs, and the effects of that. so in the '90s, i believe, i remember some of the homes having eight to 10 kids living in them and some of the homes i remember two bunk beds, so four kids in a bedroom and two kids on the top and two on the

bottom. when you have that many kids around and the constant turnover and kids would constantly be coming and going and foster parents, they don't supply adequate care, even in the best of circumstances when you have 10 kedds you can't necessarily supply as much care as the kids need. in that continuing instability and turnover rate, it's basically impossible. so, yeah, i remember a lot of squalor, uncertainty, just like grime and dirt and, yeah, it was really, really unpleasant. and the tacit agreement seems to be that, you know, as long as the kids aren't being actively abused or harmed or mistreated that, you know, the people and the social workers and people involved would kind of look the other way because it's better for kids to be living in those circumstances than sleeping on the streets, which is probably true, but these, you know, the system is just severely broken and i document some of those experiences in the book.

>> so a lot of people who go through this kind of foster care experience, you know, tend to think things might have been better had they stayed with their biological family. you make a point of saying you never went to-- obviously, your mother was deported and you weren't really sure who your father was, but you never made a point of sort of trying to go seek out relatives in any way. why was that? and you also make a point about the other kids who you were in foster homes with who were sort of constantly going back and forth between their biological families and foster families, why don't you feel you have that desire to seek out your biological family? >> i note in the book that, you know, once i became old enough for that to be a question that i could seriously contemplate, i very quickly arrived at the conclusion that my birth parents clearly didn't want me

in their life and so, why would i want to seek them out and form a connection with nos people and i write about my adoptive family after i left the foster system and a lot of the difficulties and imperfections and mistakes and catastrophes. but they chose me and i feel and i still feel connected to them in that way as a result of that. and so, you know, feel like that's my family for all the blunders and everything that i write about in the book, i feel connected to them and even if i were to meet my birth parents, i don't think i would feel connected in that same way. and to go back to the point of the dysfunction of the foster system. there was never any possibility of me reuniteed with my family of origin because my mother, she left the country. no one know how my family was. there was no extended family

member in the u.s. at least to the knowledge of the social workers involved in my case and yet i spent just shy of five years in the system in l.a. with seven different foster homes in los angeles. and the reason i ended up in the adoption system in the first place was because at some point i required to see a psychiatrist and the doctor looked through my report and recognized that, oh, this kid isn't going to be reunited with his family of origin and he recommended that i be put up for adoption as soon as possible. but someone should have recognized this earlier. someone should have recognized when i was three years old and immediately put me into the adoption system, but instead i was in a holding pattern of going to different homes all the time until someone finally took the time and carefully read my report. and this is just, you know, i basically got lost in in this

bureaucratic system and this happened to a lot of kids. >> after you were adopted this is the first time that you had this real father figure in your life. can you describe sort of what was different about that? throughout the book you make a lot of the fact that when you got to yale, the kids there come from two parent families and so, for few years of your life you had this stable two-parent family. talk a little about the family particularly about the relationship that you had with your father then. >> so right after i was-- adopted just before my eighth birthday. i remember being very just full of joy, having a family. at one point, so when i was still in the final foster, i lived my adoptive parents came to visit me at henderson family and called the person who became my adoptive mother,

mrs. henderson and if you're comfortable with it, you can call me mom. that's how i sort of recognized that something was different for this family and i was going to be in a permanent placement. and so for a little over a year i did have this stable family. it was a working class family in this kind of dusty blue collar town in northern california called red bluff. my adoptive father was a truck driver. my adoptive mother was an assistant social worker, she'd had some other jobs, too, but that's the job she settled on when i was adopted and they paid the bills, made ends meet, we had a family, family dinners, it was the kind of family i would see on tv or in the movies of like a mom and dad and adoptive sister who was their birth daughter. then they divorced about a year later after the adoption and my adoptive father was, you know,

he was angry at my adoptive mother for leaving him and he retaliated by cutting off contact with me. and this was really, you know, his-- it was really hard for me. after never knowing my birth father and then all of the foster homes and then losing my adoptive father and you know, i was nine years old by this point so my mother got full custody of me and we settled in a kind of gloomy duplex downtown. and she was working full-time and making ends meet, but her attention was taken up by those tasks and i was this kind of latch key kid and would get into trouble and mischief with my friends and you know, a lot of other kids in this neighborhood. this is interesting, the other scholars sense that i've learned, that the research and kind of changing deterioration

of the family in these communities. so i was adopted in the late '90s and i kind of got a front row seat what's happening in these middle class families in the country and i had other friends growing up in this town, raised by single moms, one by single dad. one his dad was in prison and it's a common picture and these are the friends i had, that were distracted, busy or neglective and do the things that sally mentioned, drug use and i drank beer for the first time when i was five in one of the foster homes and started drinking whiskey and smoking weed and other drugs later. and that's not uncommon for a boy in those circumstances. >> so, throughout this period you're in school and there

seemed to be sort of good years and bad years and they're years where, you know, your love of reading and, you know, your desire to succeed at this sort of seems to kind of push you along and then you kind of give up and decide there is no way you can win at this. >> can you describe the role that schooling played in this period? you were kind of leading these two parallel lives, whatever was going on at home and whatever was going on at school, but in the book, you sort of make the point that a lot of people focus on education as the thing that's going to save, you know, particularly, you know, struggling kids from lower classes. and you say that, you don't think that that's necessarily going to happen, but it seems to have worked out in some ways for you. so just, what role do you think education can play in helping kids like you?

you know, i'm thankful for the direction of my life and the academic successes that i've had. but i don't think it's the end all and be all. i was the only one of my friends who did go off to college after eight years in the military and figuring out how to redirect my life trajectory, but i had five friends who never went and when i think back to those years and the kind of students we were. i don't know even if you placed them in the best environment possible that they were necessarily academically inclined, but i did have two friends who went to prison. i had one friend who was shot to death and i think that if they had been raised in different environments, different families, different values, different norms, that they wouldn't have been incarcerated. maybe they wouldn't have gone to college, but they wouldn't have been incarcerated. there's not so much to do to

raise the ceiling as far as potential, but i think there's a lot to do to raise the floor, as far as how far down these kids drop. yeah, my own experience is, you can read about it in the book, the reversals, when i had stability at home my grades would include and when i was in the foster home at one point they thought i had a learning disability because my grades were so poor. in hindsight it's ridiculous to think you have this boy who is being relocated and changing homes and schools every few months and he is not doing well and the next step is to attach a label to him, learning disability, medicalize his problem and not took too deeply into the underlying condition. and then, yeah, once i was adopted and i had that family i mentioned for the first year or so, you know, my academic performance increased a lot and then the divorce, my academic

performance dropped. i was very responsive to how much over sight and stability and containment i had at home. by the time i graduated high school i had a 2.2gpa and it's in the bottom third of my class. i was just not in a position to apply for college by that point. but this question, can education help everyone, you know, one of the strongest predictors of academic achievements is coming from a two-parent family. so that's something that we could focus on if we want more kids to excel and do well in school. we can look at what's going on at home. there's a lot of focus on the schooling system and what we could do to improve it and probably improvements that could be made, but the schools i went to aren't horrible, they were public schools, they weren't bad. the teachers were okay, but what was-- the issue for me is what was going on in the family and the home and the same for my friends and i, for them, too.

and so i just saw a study, i think it was an economist in harvard who found there were roughly 25,000 kids in the country from lower to middle income homes who could qualify for admission into what, you know, an idea or idea plus college and you know, i read a study and it was probably right. a lot of the kids could go and they're overlooked for different reasons and obstacles in their paths. there are millions of kids in this country who again, they wouldn't necessarily qualify for admission to some very expensive prestigious university, but they could still find ways to improve their early life circumstances and enthey have a safe, secure, moving childhood. even if we got every single one of those kids to get fancy degrees from an elite school that wouldn't necessarily make up for the difficult or early

life experiences and i think for a lot of people. i've spoken to other people who had similar experiences to me and achieved upward mobility that, you know, it doesn't make up for it. it's not worth the trade. that it's essentially that having a more conventional upbringing is actually more valuable than the kinds of success and achievement we focus on. and so people who set educational policy tend to be college graduates who are good at school and don't think so much about the fortunate family hive that they have. i have this line in the book, i've met rich people who have attempted to, you know, to envision what it would be like to be poor to not have money, but never had anyone who tried to imagine what it would be

like to grow up without your family. it's so much a part of the water, you swim in it, when you don't have that, college is not priority. if you tell a kids mired in dysfunction and deprivation, some way you're going to harvard. i think they'd say i wish i knew where my dad was, or my mom wasn't on drugs or i felt safer at home or there was an adult out there who cared about me. >> i wanted to-- i'm really interested in the point you're making about raising the floor instead of the ceiling and i wonder if you could sort of talk a little bit more about the leaders and maybe this is a point you make a lot about kind of the elite bubble that people are living in that they assume college education is the best thing for everyone and something that's going to fix all of our kids' problems. can you sort of talk more about that, this idea of raising the

floor, what would it look like? maybe it's just about family stability, but are there other things you think we could be done to improve the floor for a lot of kids while instead of focusing on 25,000 kids who could be getting in ivy league schools, but are not? >> there's-- i mean, there are sort of economic solutions to this. there are ways to twist the dials of certain economic policies to make sure that families can stay together and provide and take care of their kids, but i-- there's also, i think, a cultural piece here, too. the kind of messaging that we receive from media and pop culture and all of these kind of things, i think those could also play a role in cultivating and promoting stable family structures and shifting-- i mean, there's just so much. like right now it's

interesting. among the sort of elite and chattering classes, poly amourous and those can be well-resourced and kind of cognitively atypical person, but for most people with children, two parent family is the way to go. if you want to maximize the statistical odds of that kid succeeding or at least not catastrophically failing. so, i think, yeah, a lot of cultural messaging plays a role as well here. you know, if you're a person in an upper middle class neighborhood and your parents are married and all of your neighbors are married and your friends, their parents are married and that's the kind of water that you're swimming in, but-- if you turn on the tv or listen to music, pop culture, they're

showing you images of novel relationships and infidelity. you have the models in front of you for what a healthy relationship looks like, even if you're getting this other stuff from outside sources, but if you're a kid in a poor working class community and you are raised by an unmarried parent and you don't know your mother or your father, all of your friends are in similar circumstances, everywhere you turn in your personal life and you see what a functional healthy marriage looks like and you look at culture, it's polyamorous marriage or whatever, for a normal monogamous relationship. and the guardrails and spiral out of control. so, let's talk about drugs. i mean, obviously you had the situation, the reason why you

went into foster care system in the first place and talked about the early years you started drinking and using drugs and then, you know, after you were in the military for a while, you, now, finally sort of confronted these problems. can you sort of talk a little about your journey, but also kind of where you see our culture in drugs and you know, what your concerns are and also, you know, whether -- in terms of our both laws and cultural attitudes that maybe we could get into the luxury belief question, too, so-- >> yeah, well, just recent -- it's everywhere you turn in a major city you smell marijuana just everywhere now and i remember the line when i was like a teenager, oh, it's natural, it's not as bad as alcohol and i think-- i mean, now it's, you know, people are creating these strains and much stronger than it used to be. even 15 or 20 years ago my

understanding is that weed has gotten very potent and then there's like dabs and all of these different ways to take drugs now and weed and i think, yeah, again, it can be fun for you if most of your life is stable and predictable and secure and so on. when you have access to drugs and you don't have that stability in place and don't have good role models around you, your life can quickly spiral out of control. you know, when i was a kid it was like, when we were nine, it was pretty ease toy get cigarettes and later we'd get cold medicine and then at later california introduced a law you could only buy a certain amount of medication over-the-counter because people were abusing it. but it was still like hard, it was friction anytime we wanted to get something, you had to evercome obstacles to get good drugs. but if all drugs were legal all

the time, you know, i could imagine my friend and i at 15 or 16 years old very quickly, you know, like if fentanyl-- probably is around now in red bluff. in mid 2000's if it was around and available, probably not all of us would have made it today. so, yeah, i think that drugs, like legalizing hard drugs, i would classify it as a luxury belief. i just read this article about oregon, legalizing hard drugs and now severe issues with people ingesting drugs and overdoses and people dying in the streets now and i think it sounds good on paper, but, i mean, even, you know, it doesn't pass the common sense test, that if you legalize drugs things will necessarily improve. so, yeah, i think it's a real mistake. even weed. i've thought about this, that you know, young people tell me now they're basically high 24/7

and i wonder in the aggregate if it will more harmful than alcohol. if you have 100 people on the highway, and one of them is drunk. that's dangerous. if you have 100 people on the highway and 30 of them are stoned, that's where we're at, stoned 24/7 on weed at the individual level they don't pose the same threat as being drunk, but they could pose equal dangers. >> and for those of us not familiar, tell us what a luxury belief it and what happened when you got to yale. >> so i arrived at yale at a weird time in 2015 after eight years in the military. so i was, you know, i was

discharged in august, started class in september, and then in october i saw, you know, the halloween costume controversy as it came to be known and i was just mystified by it. this idea that so, you know, i don't know if i want to go into the entire specifics that was sort of the birth of cancel culture and, you know, it wasn't quite the birth of wokeness, but the birth of when what people now call wokeness spilled out of the universities. the national attention of students trying to get professor fired for essentially freedom of expression so that was a strange experience for me and i would interact with the students and learn about them and their views and opinions about family or about class or about sex work and almost all

of their views were at odds with what i would hear from people i knew back home or from people i knew when i was enlisted. and not every single one of these students, but a disproportionate number held these strange views so i held the idea of luxury beliefs, ideas and on affluent and causing conflict on the lower classes and these ideas, they can give the appearance of sophistication and signal one's expensive education and job and social and cultural capital. but once those beliefs are implemented into policy or spread throughout the culture, gradually, they can have downstream effects for everyone else. i mean, i coined the term luxury belief by 2019 and i

never would have guessed within a year people would call to abolish the police and defund the police and then they realized what that meant and maneuvers and that was the policy and attitude at large suspicion of law enforcement and as a result, a lot of people were killed. homicide rates increased and violence increased 2020 and 2022. in 2022 i'd open an article in the wall street and say year over year homicides have increased exponentially since 2020. and those were facts and over the last year or so, the attitude around law enforcement has filled out and then there was a tech executive killed in san francisco and he was identified by name in the media and got an article written about him. there were a couple of journalists a few months ago, i think one in philadelphia, one in new york city and as

identified by name and articles written about them and i'm reading this, so if you're, you know -- if you're the way that i interpreted how these cases are treated if you're a peasant and you die, you're a statistic. if you're a member of the aristocracy, you're identified by name and a piece about you. if even if your luxury beliefs catch up to you're honored and treated with the special record. this member of upper society gets killed and they get treated very differently. so, core feature of a luxury belief, the they're sheltered by the consequences of his or her beliefs and sometimes it does, but treated differently when it does. >> an odd review of your book in the washington post and i thought it contained maybe a misunderstanding of what a luxury belief was. i wonder if you could respond to it. he argues the radicalism of his

career was hypocrisy born from self-interest, that privileged undergraduates want the less want to be opioid addicted so they can be wealthier by comparison. is that what you meant? >> no, i didn't say that anywhere. i mean, i wouldn't, you know, i am a not that cynical. you know, i wouldn't say everyone, but you know, it wouldn't surprise me if 1 to 5% of these students and graduates of elite ut universities, maybe not in those terms, but gain every advantage possible and if there are losers in society that that would be okay. yeah, it's not that extreme. i think a lot of the luxury beliefs are supported because, you know, people want to feel like they're heart is in the right place, they want to feel

moral and good and people are good at sort of justifying to themselves why these views are appropriate and people are good at finding ways to do the intellectual acrobatics to make themselves-- support ideas that make they feel feel good. so, but there's a duplicity there that i want people to focus on. there was a study i cite in the book, a stat that only 10% of children born to college educated parents are raised out of wedlock, but then when you ask people with college degrees, is it important for children to be raised by two parents, 75% of them say no. so there's a mismatch between what waited people say versus what they do. and it's the same with people on the police, you can see that there was a survey in 2020 that showed the highest income americans to defund the police and look where they live, very safe zip codes during the unrest in 2020, a lot of them

were hiring security and off duty police officers and for their own personal safety they like having people who are armed on who can protect them, but for everyone else who rely on police, they have a different attitude. so, yeah, i would just say yeah, i'm not quite that cynical, but with the caveat, the way that she worded that, maybe she herself, you know, (laughter) >> we sort of skipped over and i want to get back to your time in the military because it was very formative for you. you kind of initially maybe even give it a little short shrift by saying, you know, as long as you occupy young men from, say, the ages of 18 to 25, they'll inevitably better off than if you let them sort of do whatever they wanted. i'll take that point, but i wonder if you could sort of talk about those years and you know, what they did, you know, to form the person you are today. >> yeah, well, i think i do stand by that.

like i said, essentially if you locked up all young men, late teens, early 20's, 85% of the crime, especially violent crime would vanish and if you look at recidivism rates across time by the late 20's most, you know, most people don't -- they don't commit at least to the extent. so, yeah, i learned a lot during those years. sometimes when people, you know, if they read those chapters of my book, tell the stories of me and my friends during that time. yeah, you're just so different than what i'm reading here or what you've told me and people change anyway. i mean, i'm 30, i'm in my 30's now and everyone is different between 17 and, you know -- but i was in for eight years and those were, yeah, those are the most formative years for anyone's life, most people, 17 to 25, i was underaged when i enlisted and i had to have my

adoptive mom sign what was a permission slip because i was legally a child. i was 18 and i fled and got out when i was 25. that was a long eight years, i enlisted for four and when i was 21, and then i, you know, the reason why i reenlisted was because, now, they offered to station me in germany and sounded like a fun adventure, but at 21 i knew i'm still not mature enough to like find my way in the world without this structure in place like i still needed it and i needed all eight of those years to finally be a self-sufficient and functional adult because i wasn't equipped with those attributes during my upbringing. and so, yeah, i learned discipline, camaraderie, how to, you know, how organizations function.

teamwork, how to be a good supervisor later on i achieved promotions, but then, you know, one distinction, make in the book, motivation versus discipline. a lot of people say that you know, if they want to accomplish something, they have to feel motivated or don't want to do something because they lack the motivation and one thing i learned when i was enlisted motivation is not that important, what is important is self-discipline. very few people are motivated to do very difficult things, it doesn't come naturally to most people, but often what separates successful from unsuccessful people is doing the thing you don't feel motivated to do, but doing it anyway. and sort of being about this gym routines. maybe you don't want to go to the gym not motivated to do, but self-discipline you do it anyway and string enough of the days together and large tasks and projects can be accomplished and you've become

a different person as a result of that. but that was something i've learned, too. the military it's like, you have to do all of these things you hate all the time, waking up early, especially making your bed, every aspect of your bed is tightly controlled. and it's tedious and monotonous and i glossed a lot over in the book the description, but if i told you day-to-day, you would be bored to tears, let's move on, you're going to lose interest. so, and that was important for me, all of it, every step of that. and in learning. and i carry that with me later into college, oh-- in high school i never wanted to study and so i didn't because i didn't have motivation and in college i also didn't want to study, but by that point i had cultivated enough self-discipline to do the thing even though i didn't want to. >> i'm going to have one more question for you and then we'll open it up to the audience. so start thinking about your questions. there are at least two other

memoirs i think your book has been compared to and one of them is j.d. vance hillbilly elegy, and tara's book educated. and i don't know if you've read them, but some thematic similarities and i wonder what you think of them. those books were hugely popular and there seems to be hunger for people to understand what is going on in the lives of, you know, kids who are growing up in somewhat dysfunctional families and lower classes and you know, kind of what are the things that they're object serving now about the world around them that could help them succeed. so i just wanted to see if you had thoughts on these other authors and what you think we're all kind of looking for in these books and go a little meta. >> it's a good setup with both of them. and people have expected me to have read everything and people follow on twitter, you read a

lot. have you read this? i say no, i thought you read that. >> and i enjoyed both of them and thought they were both really good and yeah, offer a glimpse into a kind of segment of society that a lot of people don't have much familiarity with. especially a lot of highly educated people from more sort of affluent or upper middle class backgrounds. and, yeah, i think a lot of people who are interested in policy or improving society or finding ways to lift people up, you know, it's hard to do that when everyone around you and interact you with and your friends and social circle seem to be doing well and poverty or squaller are abstract to you,

and when you read these books what it's like for people in these other communities and we're looking for, i think, how, what can we do. it's one of the things to say here is that policy, but how will that be implemented in people's lives. you know, that was something that i thought a lot about with my book is i didn't want it to just be this kind of conventional, like bootstrap narrative oh i started in this difficult situation and ended up achieving some kind of success so i also wanted to focus on what's the modal outcome for a young person, a young guy born and raised in the circumstances and so i tell the stories of my friends and where their lives ended up and how that's the expected outcome for someone like this and you can't necessarily replicate what i did for every single person. it's not going to work, but

there are ways we can think about how to ensure, you know, young people, young guys who aren't going off to college and maybe not interested or academically inclined how can we improve their early life circumstances. even if they do end up as adults making mistakes and you know, engaging in of defeating behaviors that at the very least they could have had a better upbringing. towards the end of the book i write something like, even if childhood stability had zero effect on a person's outcome, like incarceration, graduation, so on, cultivating and ensuring that a kid is raised in safe and stable circumstances, to still work and trying to promote because it's good in itself. if i show you an instance and say, hey, some day this kid is going to grow up to be a

violent criminal, does it matter how the kid is raised right now? if the answer is yes, i think we should be-- what happens before age 18 rather than what happens after. >> all right. i lied, we're actually going to give sally a couple of questions if she wants them and then we're going out to the audience. >> yes, we have a lot of time for questions. so, rob, obviously, you beat the odds. i can't imagine what those odds were, you know, one in x. i don't know, but it was steep. but it's a poignant reminder how many kid don't make it out. i know you just got your ph.d. and figuring out the next steps. but as you've been contemplating what might be in the future, when do you think you could do, as an individual. what might you be able to do? i feel you might feel some sense, i shouldn't put words in your mouth, it's not a policy

book, but some affinity to help the younger-- the new generations of rob's? >> yeah, i think as an individual that's tough because we want to transform the entire system and we get bogged down in statistics and sort of snapshot aggregate survey date it, but at the individual level, yeah, i think there's a lot we can do to make a difference in people's lives. as soon as i got out of the air force and went to yale, i volunteered tutoring kids from the local community, new haven is sort of rundown blue collar town with kids from difficult upbringings. and there are things to do at the individual level, volunteer work and so on. now i'm doing talks at foster care organizations and boys and girls clubs and you know, trying to communicate the story. so to let the academically inclined kids know that this is a possibility for them.

i think, you know, these stories can help to like crystallize for kids that, you know, there's a path upward, but also, to remind people that, you know, for the kids who maybe that path isn't the best one for them that we could think about in the immediate moment. how to think about more resources through foster care and trying to support families so their kids aren't taken from them and that as well. you could also be a drug counselor, honestly, as part of your repertoire. everything you're saying about how you kind of emerged from your-- well, you used the word, low grade depression, and strengthened from your emotional states and impulsivity is really what you do in recovery. okay. so ready for questions? >> right there. >> wait for the microphone, please.

>> when goldman wrote about the destroyed family life in the wake of the russian civil war and the difficult effort to establish social services and to ensure that children weren't feral running around murdering and stealing, the aftermath of that was the fierce social conservativism of comrade stalin. so i'm wondering if past political movements were, in part, the authoritarianism was a reaction to the destroyed family lives of the prior generation. >> i'm inclined to say, yes or maybe. you know, i'm thinking-- there was this really interesting study, there's a psychologist, the researchers michael peterson, he was an

author on this paper on populism and one of the conclusions he draws, you know, he collected data from the u.s. and i think from some european countries as well support of populism and found that, you know, there's this kind of inverse correlation with populism and socioeconomic status and he included other measures like interest in dominance and the need for status and those kinds of things and inversely correlated. and one of the conclusions he draws is that people who are interested in populist solutions having a strongman leader they feel their own values aren't in the culture and want to elect someone into their preferences into society. they themselves are not interested in seeking those positions where people oppose today populism dominance and

they don't like the idea of strongman occupying that seat pause they themselves would like that role. i was reading that paper, yeah, i feel like a lot much people they don't hold luxury beliefs, conventional moderate, middle of the road views or common common sense perspective, but then they look around their communities and see that it's not at all reflected back at them. they see deteriorating families and drug use and people making very poor decisions and people who-- a disproportionate amount committeeing committing crimes. and people forget that. most poor people don't want crimes, but are suffering the most from. i find some data in the book, people in the bottom income category in the u.s. are far

more likely to be basically every kind of crime. and so if that fear of community and then, you know, some strongman appears and says i'm going to clean things up for you and implement your preferences, that would be very appealing to people who aren't that interested in getting involved in politics and seeking leadership positions and outsource that, this figurehead to do that for them and that could be, could be what you're describing there with stalin. >> over here? >> an interesting insight. i was wondering if you could speak to the, what obviously i think is important which is the lack of jobs for men who are not that well-educated which in my view, perhaps not yours, has impacts on the ability to fulfill the role that we think about.

i myself grew up in a neighborhood that sounds like-- and i think about the jobs of the fathers around me had, they mostly don't exist anymore, no more factory jobs, lower clerical jobs, et cetera, et cetera. so i'm wondering what are your views on that? >> you know, i -- i used to hold that view. my confidence in it has dropped somewhat. i read this book recently, the two-parent privilege, melissa carney, a really good book came out a few months ago and she reports some research in parts of the country where there were fracking booms, where suddenly, men with low education were able to obtain high paying jobs and then the researcher monitored whether marriage rates increased and whether these men became more sort of appealing partners and the

answer was no. like marriage rates didn't increase and they didn't become more appealing partners, at least, you know, if you use marriage as a proxy for that. and so i think that one of melissa carney's points of the book is that this is-- there may be an economic piece here, but and maybe, you know, jobs are there, but not sufficient, but there needs to be a cultural piece, too. maybe these men needs jobs that makes them appealing, but there also has to be a culture that champions marriages and valuizing two parent families for kids and we're moving away from that. if you give high paying jobs, but the community has sort of wrecked and marriage has not been a part of the culture for so long that, you know, that money alone isn't going to mitigate the issue. >> thank you.

everyone, you should read this bock, it's absolutely riveting. you'll read it quickly because you won't be able to put it down. rob, so you have a ph.d. in psychology from cambridge. one would expect you would maybe become a practicing psychologist or seek an academic career, but when you project yourself five or 10 years in the future, what do you want to be doing? >> well, so for a lot of people, you know, they hear psychologist and they think of, you mentioned like putting on the couch, but that's the image of someone who does clinical work, but the vast majority of people with psychology ph.d.'s have no clinical expertise whatsoever. they study things like social psychology, evolutionary psychology, or child development, but they don't do

much in the way of, you know, treating mental health. that's clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. for me, i studied-- it was sort of amalgum, i spent a lot of personality and social, and, yeah, i settled about-- my first year in grad school i knew i wasn't going to be an academic because i'd seen too much, you know, just the direction of academia was really alarming. i describe in detail what happened at yale. and then write about cambridge. one of the reasons i went abroad i thought maybe this was an american thing. like u.s. universities, the elite utes, the ivy league waved with this new wave of political correctness, maybe i'll get out of here and i had an image of stodgy old oxford

that didn't have time for this nonsense. they have plenty of time for it. they like it, too. [laughter] >> it's maybe five years, maybe 10 years behind the u.s. how bad it is, but it's still pervasive. so i saw people, i saw post docs get fired and early researchers have their careers jettisoned at cambridge and a lot of it happened behind the scenes. what i tell people now that for every public academic cancellation you see there are at least five others you don't hear about. most people who want to be researchers and scholars, like they're not seeking the limelight. they don't want media attention. they want to put their head down and hopes it blows over and maybe find another position somewhere else. that's the common case, but there are a lot of people fired and lost their jobs through the last 10 years or so. and so i was dead set against an academic career, but then, you know, university of austin, this new fledging university in

texas they approached me so i have an affiliation there. you know, my-- i got this-- i was approached by sub stack to have my newsletter to their platform and that's been paying the bills and you know, so we'll see, but as far as an academic job goes, i'm still unimpressed with the legacy institutions. >> in the back right here. >> you have described the concept of luxury beliefs as costs upon the lower classes in exchange for social benefits of the upper classes, but it increasingly seems like some things like transgenderism, for instance, the upper classes are very had in their case as well and there are not just-- expressing support for them, but not actually practicing them. how does at that alter your view of luxury belief? >> well, so transgender-- well, generally, the luxury

beliefs they can inflict costs on the upper classes, but the price is lower. they are in a better position to withstand the damage of the costs that would be inflicted. i'm trying to think about the transgender case in particular. i mean, even something like medically, if they were to undergo something like that they would have the resources to reverse it if they decided later on that it was an error. whereas for someone who doesn't have much in the way of resources, they decide to undergo some kind r some kind of medical operation or some kind of treatment, and then later they decide maybe this wasn't the right choice for them, they may not be in a position to afford to reverse that choice. ... choice, i think more broadly, too. i mean, even things like like like drug as another example.

if you're a well-off person and you decide to do a lot of hard drugs, you know, if you're like like a rock star who promotes and glorifies drug use and then and you yourself live that lifestyle, you are a millionaire and you can afford doctors and rehab and therapists and all the other you are a millionaire and you can afford doctors and we have an therapist and all the other things available to you as a result of your own choices. but then a lot of the kids listen to you, they do the same thing and a a model the behavr you are promoting. they don't have the same access to treatment and care and so forth. >> in the back over there. >> i really appreciate your talk and work you've done. i've been following you on twitter for a while. i'm also from blue-collar background is now in academia at the mercatus center. my question to you is, how do you bridge the gap between

blue-collar work and knowledge work, right? like it's very foreign to me. my parents run a small business so i see low, sell high pick ann blue-collar work there's a product, right? as someone from that background in academia i struggle still wrap my head around the idea of the product of knowledge work. so to the academically inclined children that you have tutored in thehe past, what advice do yu give them about the nature of productivity in higher education? thank you. >> yeah, it's, it's a different kind of work because, i mean, a lot of it is sort of self motivator in academia. i recognized this early on during my phd that you have to be self driven. i enrolled in my phd program i think it was 28.

if i'd enrolled at 21, 22, the usual, the usual t age but of te college age, typical age of people finish college, yeah, i don't know if it would've worked out as well. know thing that, tt just generally benefited me was was seeking out advice from people who have succeeded in those areas. so, you know, i spoke to a lot of grad students who were slightly ahead of me in the program, spoke to professors. i would just like gathering lots of advice, just generally across my life, like whether was in the military or later in college or now that i'm doing this sort of independent writing thing on substack of just like asking people around you what are their tips, what are their tricks, what are the things that they they had known those kinds of things. you know, at least for me, like thing i wish i known when i started my ph.d. was that the first year, like regardless of how prepared you think you are, the first year is just going to be you're going to be full of self-doubt. you're going to be, you know, no matter how you're spending your time, you're going to feel like it's wrong somehow that you is

this really what i should be doing? am i supposed to be progressing toward what i supposed to have the first paper written? there's just a lot uncertainty that first year. but if someone had me down and told me that, then i would have felt much better. and eventually someone did. so yeah, i think just spending a lot of time getting advice from different sources from people who are slightly ahead of, you and whatever you're interested. so here. thanks. so my question has to do with attachment. you lost your mom at three, didn't have a dad and were in foster care till seven. so it sounds like it would have had a primary caregiver in that period and. according to attachment theory, john. but john bobby's work, that would have been a really difficult thing to overcome. and i'm wondering if you, you know, have thought about this and how you did overcome that.

yeah. yeah. read john bobby's work. harry harlow, too. i'm reading a good book right now called love at gun park about. harry harlow and his work with rhesus macaque monkeys and and then later with with human and attachment theory. it's really good. yeah. mean i write in the book about the difficulty of of even leaving my mom in the first place that you a lot of it there's a lot of research and attention paid you know the kind of maternal impulse to care a child and that sort of attachment and father's to have the way that the parent feels toward a newborn toward a small child. but there's less think less research on on the other side that of just how much how attached child feels to their parents and how deeply that connection is felt. and happens after it's severed and. so that was really for me to

leave my mom. and then and then the first foster homes, i think the first two homes i lived in, it was really upsetting that i had to leave them and know like the body adapts and i about this sort of coping response of just kind of being blunted and and and later just sort of from all emotions and feelings. it was, you know, this wasn't like a conscious, deliberate thing. it's just a sort of the body reacts in this almost instinctive way where, you know, shut down to not feel negative emotions. but as a consequence that i also shut down from feeling positive. and it took a lot of to overcome. and, you know, i could feel it, you know, i could feel it sometimes. it was like it was sort of submerged and i had to sort of work really hard to access those feelings later. but yeah, it's. it takes a lot of work and adulthood to overcome, i even

more so and there's a lot of focus paid to economic deprivation but not as much on on childhood instability and. it's actually instability that predicts detrimental outcomes in adulthood than deprivation. and so. yeah yeah, i think that that the instability piece needs to be more salient for over here. hey rob thanks so much for coming out. i'm jared i do outreach here too. i've been a fan of yours for a good number of years. have you put any into how deviancy and these notions of families and norms have such cultural power because luxury beliefs kind of rests on idea that the elite have a strong on how the rest of society orients

itself. and you know, i think we've lost and c so i'm just curious how you think that plays in and people are attracted to those sorts of things. why why the, the elites are attracted deviancy or why the elites then everyone else too, right. because otherwise if, if it is true then these poor ideas do hold sway over even those who are not in the upper class. i mean, it's fun, i guess. yeah. like, like living in a, in environment of complete freedom, of no rules, no norms. no. especially when you're young and especially when it comes to things like drugs and sex and relationships and and yeah. having like a feeling that there are no boundaries and no limits be very or transgressing them that even if the boundaries are there. but stepping over them can very thrilling. and so i think this is, you know this is one reason why once you

know once once it becomes introduced, it becomes very difficult to walk it back, even if people want to simply they become so accustomed to having that level of freedom and that level of of excitement or ability to indulge. it did seem like, at least for the kind of upper and upper middle class, they did bounce. i mean, the divorce rates even for college educated people in the 1970s, once no fault divorce was implemented and. the laws liberalized that divorce actually increased a lot for college people and marriage rates dropped. but then by the 1980s, they recovered and essentially to where they were in the early 1960s. and so it does seem like at, least for people who are well resourced and educated and so on, that they almost recognize like, oh, this was fine, but maybe we shouldn't continue doing this. and that's there's actually sort of there are better and worse

ways to live and raise families. whereas for the lower classes and people who lack resources and like education and you know, just have a different kind of cognitive personality profile that. they indulge in. yeah, they and they indulge in and and enjoy the lack of restraint. and even if they recognize that these decisions are bad, it's enough. i mean, this is a point that i make in the book, too, is that knowledge alone isn't enough to make good choices. you know everyone knows that vegetables are good for you. but you know, most people will still order the fries instead of the side salad. most everyone knows that smoking's bad for you. and yet you you go to the doctor and you say that you smoke. because i used to smoke and, you know, every single time the doctor would give me this little mini lecture and i'm like, bro, i know smoking's bad. just like, you're not gonna tell me, like, every time i buy a pack. it's like, it's right there that it's bad for you. do i care?

no, but it's still useful to have it reinforced repeatedly that having the doctor give you that lecture and time you buy a pack. there's that warning label, like in the aggregate. it does actually, over time, having the norm in the stigma and the shame around smoking it did have an effect on people's behavior time. so now the number of americans who smoke has dropped by half since the 1980s. and so yeah, so introducing stigma and shaming norms and limitations that can change behavior over time. but right here. so kink is conscientiousness, innate or cannot be taught because when i think of a stable marriage, i think two people who can make keep commitments. i think it's both. i think conscientiousness. so unlike intelligence conscientiousness can respond to incentives. you know, if i if i introduce

penalties and rewards and try to make you smarter that's not going to work very well. but if i introduce penalties and rewards to get you to, you know be punctual and respectful cool and committed and those kinds of things like people regardless of their sort of innate level of conscientiousness, will behave in certain ways as a result of those incentives and environments and structure place. so i think now in this complete it's not complete, but you know, it's much more sort of the the attitudes around marriage and relationships are much more liberalized and free than they used to be that if you're very high, conscientious, this person that you can make it work. you can still make a marriage in a relationship work. but for people aren't as conscientious and aren't as sort of what thoughtful and considerate notes and inclined toward commitment and those kinds things. it's much harder, but if you're

in an environment where that's the expected behavior and that were praised for engaging in it and, you know, to some extent maybe penalized little bit for deviating from it, that you can actually behave in a different way. over here. you talked a bunch about one thing that you can do to reduce crime rates is just lock up all the 17 to 25 year olds of having been 17 to 25. i agree, but how do you feel about having a more institutionalized system like bringing back the draft or national service service. so the countries that have national service, at least the ones that i'm familiar with, they're there in countries that are actually.

a under sort of ongoing threat. so like israel, for example, they have national service. it's necessary for a national security. south korea as well. they border a country with an insane dictator. and so they have national service. i don't know if you could sort of recreate the support and conditions and interest in a like the us where we're not border. i mean maybe if canada went crazy decided to, you know, then we could but but i think, you know, as of now, i don't know if it could work in same way, maybe maybe something other than sort military service if it was some other kind of national service, peace corps or something along those lines. i think it could be helpful, especially for, you know, like one thing that the military does very well is you get introduced to people like a cross-section of society from different parts of the country geographically across class lines, across race

and ethnicity, all those kinds of things like you just learn about people from very backgrounds than yourself. and so, you know, i'm not i guess like in principle not opposed to something like a national service, but i just don't know. like in terms of like in practicality, in terms of, you know, political support, how much there would be. so i think we're going to take that last question. sort of washington. washington, is this working sort of washington post article? who says that, like, you know, this isn't really a policy book, which i mean, it's kind of true. it's a memoir, but do you have like any like really policy recommendations? it's like, you know, what should the government actually do or? should watch out or some other institution do to fix its like, you know, fatherlessness or having two parents or anything like that. mm hmm. yeah. so i brought up smoking earlier and that was and that was a success story of changing behavior on a mass scale. and i remember, you know, when i

was a kid i don't know if these still exist. probably not as much, but like every time, every third commercial, it was like an anti smoking. there were billboards everywhere turned the the culture and society at large. you were reminding you that this was a very thing to do. and then know you signs would say, you know, x, x number of people die each year from lung cancer, secondhand smoke, all this stuff. and i wonder if there could be some kind of like public awareness campaign families of, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be something. it doesn't have to focus on like the negative of, oh, like if a kid is raised by a single parent home, they're x percent more likely to go to prison. i could imagine that would that would upset a lot of people. but you could even have, though, the reverse of that if if a kid is raised by a two you know two parents they're they're this percent more likely to go graduate from high school and college and to enter the middle class know like a lot of people here probably familiar with the success sequence if that you

know i just saw this survey which found that like the vast majority of both democrats and republicans support teachers instructing students on the success sequence, something like 70% of both democrats and republicans. so this is not a partizan thing that people, the political aisle think that it's important teach kids that there were grants, that if you do these three things, you can avoid poverty graduate high school, obtain full time job and get married before. you have kids and something like 98% of people who follow those three steps do not live in poverty. and a bipartisan there's there's bipartisan agreement this for voters i think for the that's a bipartisan, there is agreement on this for voters. i think for the late there's a mismatch, republican elites support something like that and o democratic elite were skeptical of it. but for ordinary people like

this is something republican elites could dwell on and focus on what actually going to greece on this. you can find ways to promote that. >> while, we really encourage you all to read robs book. you would definitely not want to put it down so please thank me, join me in thanking proper coming today. [applause] >> if you're enjoying booktv then sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, book festivals and more. booktv every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at booktv.org, television for serious readers. >> booktv every sunday on c-span2 features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. at 4 p.m. eastern inspector

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