Foster Care, Broken Homes, and America's Crisis of Meaning | Rob Henderson

Summary

Podcast Summary: Hold These Truths with Dan Crenshaw

Episode: Foster Care, Broken Homes, and America's Crisis of Meaning | Rob Henderson
Date: December 11, 2025
Host: Dan Crenshaw
Guest: Rob Henderson (author of Troubled, social psychologist, Air Force veteran)

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Overview

In this enlightening episode, Congressman Dan Crenshaw interviews Rob Henderson, a social psychologist, Air Force veteran, Yale and Cambridge graduate, and author of Troubled. The conversation explores Henderson's journey from the chaos of foster care to elite academia, using his life as a springboard to discuss America’s broken foster system, family instability, and the broader “crisis of meaning” among young men. The discussion delves into systemic failures, the cultural importance of stable families, the inadequacies of current social policy, and what America can do to restore meaning, discipline, and upward mobility.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Rob Henderson’s Origin Story and Memoir

• Opening with Hope: Henderson intentionally begins his memoir at his Yale graduation to show it’s ultimately a story with a positive ending, despite traumatic beginnings.

  "I opened the book with my Yale graduation... This was essentially a way to communicate to the reader that this story has a happy ending, but we've got to get through a lot of tough stuff first before we get there." (02:05, Rob Henderson)

• Despite elite achievements, Henderson reveals he’d trade them all for a stable childhood, reframing how we measure “success.”
• Discusses learning about his biological parents and ethnicity only as an adult, and how instability and trauma marked his early years.

The Realities of Foster Care in America

• Systemic Instability: Henderson cycled through seven homes over five years in LA, highlighting systemic neglect and a lack of individualized solutions.

  "No one actually learned that, oh, this kid is never going back [to his biological family]." (15:31, Rob Henderson)

• Frequent moves were intentional policy to avoid strong attachments, for expediency in case biological relatives claim custody later—often at the cost of the child’s well-being.
• Crenshaw and Henderson discuss the tragic logic and limitations of current law, lack of resources, and how caseworkers struggle to handle caseloads.
• The number of children in foster care has doubled due to the opioid crisis, with little increase in available quality foster homes.

  "The number of kids in foster homes as a result of parental drug addiction has doubled since the year 2000." (19:17, Rob Henderson)

Quality of Foster Care and Policy Challenges

• Many foster homes are overcrowded, motivated by stipends rather than altruism, and prone to neglect rather than abuse.

  "Some of the homes I lived in had upwards of eight or ten kids living in them...you get a stipend for each child you take in." (18:30, Rob Henderson)

• Attempts to incentivize fostering through higher payments risk attracting the wrong types of foster parents.
• Both agree best solution is not more foster families, but fewer children entering the system, which stems from addressing root causes like addiction and family breakdown.
• The war on drugs is discussed as a mitigation strategy—the supply of drugs creates demand and destabilizes families.

  "Supply creates demand... If I can just get one less drug dealer into that school... that's a dozen less kids that are going to be addicted for the rest of their lives." (26:05, Dan Crenshaw)

Instability, Family Structure, and Societal Outcomes

• Instability—not poverty—is the key predictor for bad life outcomes:

  "Early childhood instability significantly predicts... detrimental outcomes [like incarceration, substance abuse, and low graduation rates] later in life." (31:42, Rob Henderson)

• Foster kids have the worst college graduation rates—only 3%, compared to 11% for other low-income kids and 38% overall.
• Intact family structure used to be the norm: In 1960, 95% of American children lived with both biological parents; by 2005, for the poorest families, that number dropped to 30%.

  "...the dramatic divergence along class lines where most kids from well to do families, they still [have] intact families...for working class and poor kids, it went from 95% in 1960 to 30% by 2005." (33:12, Rob Henderson)

• Fatherlessness and family fragmentation are central, with both statistical evidence and personal stories to illustrate their importance.

Cultural Messaging and “Luxury Beliefs”

• Henderson denounces elite “luxury beliefs”—progressive ideas popular among the credentialed class but detrimental to the poor (e.g., drug legalization, open borders, non-traditional family structures).

  "Luxury beliefs...confer status on credentialed elites while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society." (23:24, Rob Henderson)

• He and Crenshaw criticize a culture that celebrates “liberation” and individual fulfillment over parental responsibility and commitment, even when the stakes—children’s well-being—are high.
• Henderson describes how elite culture encourages family disruption, while the same elites privately maintain disciplined, stable families.

  "Publicly they'll say, oh, you know, I got lucky, systemic forces... But then privately, they tell their own kids, you know, if you want to make it in this world, you got to work hard." (67:35, Rob Henderson)

The Crisis of Meaning and Manhood Among Young Men

• Both note the lack of strong male mentorship and rites of passage for boys as a foundational social problem, affecting motivation and direction.

  "The natural state of young males is apathy, self-indulgence and laziness." (46:51, quoting Henderson from his book)

• Henderson invokes anthropological studies showing that across cultures, societies invented tough rites of passage to “make men” of boys—something modern America lacks.
• Military service and high-intensity challenges are cited as ways to provide necessary discipline and meaning.

  "Do something hard... Just something to remind yourself that you are strong. That you can be if you choose to be." (49:15, Dan Crenshaw)

• Both advocate for more open discussion about marriage, parental duty, and the pitfalls of selfish liberation narratives.

Higher Education and the Spread of Harmful Ideas

• Henderson recounts being an outlier at Yale and Cambridge, noticing a disconnect between campus activism and real-world challenges.
• He coined “luxury beliefs” after observing how elites promote policy ideas that end up harming the vulnerable—an insight that animates much of his public writing.
• Discusses his support for standardized testing (SAT/ASVAB) as a true tool for upward mobility for disadvantaged youths.

Final Reflections & Takeaways

• Personal Responsibility and Policy: Both agree policy cannot fix everything; cultural change is needed around responsibility, marriage, and family.
• The importance of "treating Americans as you would treat your own children"—with boundaries, expectations, and accountability, not just handouts.

  "Treat people like you actually love them." (68:16, Dan Crenshaw)

• Henderson calls for both material and cultural support for struggling families, emphasizing not just redistribution, but sharing of the habits that create successful lives.
• Conservative solutions should focus on defending the “ladder” of upward mobility and promoting the values that foster resilience and stability.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the meaning of his achievements:

  “I would have exchanged all of these accomplishments to have just had a more stable childhood and not had to witness so much dysfunction and disrepair through the foster care system.” (03:30, Rob Henderson)

• On policy and the foster system:

  “The law sort of favors the blood relatives...so maybe that [moving a child frequently] is the least bad in certain situations. But in my case, it was maybe one of the worst.” (13:27, Rob Henderson)

• On incentives and quality of foster care:

  “I think, I don't know if there's necessarily a policy solution...because you could think of something like economic incentives. But then the type of people who would be attracted to the economic incentive may not be the types of people that you want.” (20:14, Rob Henderson)

• On instability over poverty:

  "Even when researchers control for family income, they still find that early childhood instability significantly predicts those detrimental outcomes later in life." (31:42, Rob Henderson)

• On the disappearance of rites of passage:

  "In these societies [studied], every single one of them had rituals in place to shepherd boys into men...For boys, it's not as if you magically, you know, you turn 15 and you're magically a man or something.” (47:41, Rob Henderson)

• On military service and meaning:

  “That was the environment that I needed to be in, even though subjectively I'm like, God, this sucks. Why did I do this?...But, yeah, it was exactly what I needed.” (54:24, Rob Henderson)

• On elite values versus real life:

  "Luxury beliefs...end up backfiring and hurting the very people they're meant to help. And it's all about sort of boosting your own reputation." (62:02, Rob Henderson)

• On policy and love:

  "We should treat the American people like we would treat kids that we love." (68:04, Dan Crenshaw)

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Suggested Listening Segments

• Rob's Reflections on Success and Stability: 02:05–04:31
• Deep Dive into Foster Care Failings: 12:29–19:17
• Family Structure and Societal Outcomes: 29:43–34:16
• Luxury Beliefs & Cultural Messaging Critique: 23:24–24:43, 62:36–65:22
• Manhood and Rites of Passage: 47:04–49:56
• Concluding Thoughts on Policy and Love: 67:03–68:53

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Conclusion

This episode offers a profound, personal, and policy-relevant exploration of America’s crisis of meaning, rooting the nation’s struggles in family and cultural breakdown. Crenshaw and Henderson blend data, personal stories, and cultural critique to reveal why fixing systems alone isn’t enough—reviving strong families and honest cultural messaging is essential for American renewal.

Book Recommendation:
Rob Henderson’s Troubled (Memoir on foster care, resilience, and American society).

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Transcript

[A]

We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created. As a member of Congress, I get to have a lot of really interesting people in the office, experts on what they're talking about.

[B]

This is the podcast for insights into the issues.

[A]

China, bioterrorism, Medicare for all. In depth discussions, breaking it down into simple terms.

[B]

We hold. We hold.

[A]

We hold these truths. We hold these truths.

[B]

With Dan Crenshaw, the eagle has landed.

[A]

Welcome back to hold these Truths, everyone. We're here with Rob Henderson. Rob, welcome.

[B]

Thank you, Congressman. Great to be here.

[A]

Thanks for being on. So your life story is really pretty extraordinary. Rob grew up in chaos and instability, moved through foster homes across California, enlisted in the Air Force as a teenager and through sheer determination earned his way to Yale and later a PhD at Cambridge. God, Overachievers is a story of success. It's really just foundationally American. So glad to have you on, written a book that we're going to talk about. But and I think that's what's interesting is what you've done with that experience. Become a really insightful voice in America on class, culture, the crisis of meaning facing young men. This is a really popular topic these days. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Thoughts on manhood, responsibility, dangers of a society that no longer believes in truth, like some basic truth. So troubled. It's. I'll say a little bit about it, then I'll leave it to you. It's a memoir. I get this. I think we probably got this from your publisher. But it's a raw, unfiltered memoir about growing up in the chaos of foster care and fighting his way towards stability. It's not a victim story. It's a story about duty, discipline, and the cost, psychological and personal, of climbing the American ladder. So we're going to cover it all today. I can't wait to hear about it. So where should we begin? I mean, where does your book begin? Does it begin in this foster care system? I have a lot of questions about that.

[B]

Yeah. So one thing, Congressman, that I wanted to do with this book because the early portions of my life are often difficult to read, and I got this feedback from early readers of this book is that I actually started a little bit at the end. I opened the book with my Yale graduation. This was essentially a way to communicate to the reader that this story has a happy ending, but we've got to get through a lot of tough stuff first before we get there. So I open with this scene at my Yale graduation and I'm with My adoptive sister, my adoptive mother. And we're going through graduation. And then by the end of the book, I circle back around to this scene. And the point that I make here is, you know, I just graduated from Yale, first person in my family to go to college, my adoptive family and my biological family, for that matter. And there was this moment where I was at dinner and I get this phone call, and it was from the New York Times, of all places, where they told me they were going to run this op ed that I had written, which was titled why Being a Foster Child Made Me a conservative. This was 2018. And so I'm getting this call, I'm talking to this editor, he's asking me questions about the op ed, putting some finishing touches on it. And I'm standing outside of the restaurant having this conversation, and then I look through the window at my mom and my sister and. And it kind of hits me that I'd accomplished these things that I never thought I would accomplish. Going to college, graduating, going on to Cambridge, which I was about to begin at that point. But then it struck me that I would have exchanged all of these accomplishments to have just had a more stable childhood and not had to witness so much dysfunction and disrepair through the foster care system where I grew up in la. All of the kind of chaos that I described with my adoptive family and having to flee when I was 17 and enlisting in the military. And that was the moment where it kind of clicked for me that we spend so much time talking about these conventional badges of achievement of upward mobility. Go to college. Everyone should go to college. As long as everyone obtains a bachelor's degree, acquires a kind of middle class, white collar job, then society is a success. Whereas I thought to myself, well, I'm on my way to accomplishing those things, and yet I still feel that something was missing. And I think back to those earlier periods of my life and realizing we need to look more at what's happening with kids before the age of 18, as well as what's happening after.

[A]

So that sparked, I guess, a policy path for you, a problem you wanted to fix.

[B]

Yes, that's when it dawned on you.

[A]

I guess prior to that, it had just been your life and you accepted it as such. But that was the moment you realized I could do something about this.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And realizing, you know, as I started to write more and speak out publicly more about some of my experiences and dug into a lot of the research and sociology and developmental psychology and so forth, and realizing like, oh, like I may have something useful to say about these matters. And so I opened the book after that brief kind of story about graduation.

[A]

Show some optimism because your publishers told you to. Makes sense. You could argue both ways. You got to hook a reader. Yeah, but I like the way you did that.

[B]

So then I kind of open the early parts of the story by describing the origins of my full name. So my full name is Robert Kim Henderson, and my first name comes from my biological father, who I never met. The only information I had about him up until very recently was his name, which I found in some documents given to me by my adoptive mother, sort of passed to her from some social workers when I was an adult. My middle name, Kim, comes from my biological mother. So she came to the US From Seoul, from South Korea, as a young woman, and her life very quickly unraveled. She moved to the US to la, where I was born. And she suffered from drug addiction. And so there was a period when I was an infant. We were homeless. We lived in a car. Eventually we moved into this slum apartment in Westlake, which is your dad's? Oh, no, just my mother and I. And so. And this is the early 90s. And so my mother. Yeah, yeah, La. Especially the kind of East LA. And so my mother would have visitors coming in and out of the apartment all hours of the day, at night, trading favors for drugs. It was kind of like a crack den. And some neighbors. Do you remember this?

[A]

Like, how young?

[B]

I have some flashbulb memories of this, and I talk about some of the memories I have of my mother during this time. And eventually some neighbors called the police. They saw that there was a child in this apartment. The police show up. Social workers show up. They ask my mother, where's this boy's father? Because you're not in a position to care for him. And she said she didn't know who my father was. And so at that point, I'm three years old, and I'm placed into the Los Angeles county foster care system. And I spent just shy of five years living in seven different homes all over la. And eventually I was adopted by the Henderson family, which is my last name. And so this was the late 90s, by this point.

[A]

How old are you?

[B]

I was 8 years old.

[A]

How old are you now?

[B]

I'm 35. Yeah. And so by this point, 8 years old, I'm an unsophisticated kid. I wasn't aware that I was about to witness kind of the ongoing fragmentation of what's been happening in a Lot of kind of rundown working class communities all across the country. So my adoptive family and I, there's my adoptive mother, my adoptive father, and my adoptive sister, who was their biological daughter. So we settle in this kind of dusty blue collar town in Northern California called Red Bluff. And Red Bluff, it's located in one of the poorest counties in California. Most of the adults didn't have college degrees, very working class. My adoptive father was a truck driver. Adoptive mother was an assistant social worker. Neither of them went to college. And there was a moment during this period where my life was relatively stable. And my adoptive parents, they were nervous about adopting me because they'd had this record from the social workers, from the teachers, from my experience in foster care saying, rob has trouble focusing in school.

[A]

Yeah, I want to go back to the foster system. I'm sure you will. You're giving me the summary right now, right?

[B]

Yeah, we're happy to pause anywhere, but I was doing extremely poorly in school because I was changing homes every few months, changing school districts all the time. And there was a period where I was doing so poorly in school that my foster mother and social worker and my teacher at the time administered. They requested that the school psychologist administer an IQ test because they thought I had a learning disability. And I took the test and scored below average overall. But I scored significantly below average in the verbal section because I didn't know how to read. And I was in second grade by this point. I was seven. Barely knew the Alphabet.

[A]

Now you're writing books.

[B]

Although I don't know if that says more about me or about the state of the publishing industry.

[A]

This is a lot about you. Okay, so.

[B]

Bad student in school. But then after the adoption, my grades improved. And one theme that I didn't, I sort of knew intuitively, but then sort of sitting down and writing this all out, I realized like, each time my life was unstable, the family situation was chaotic, my grades plummeted. And then anytime there was stability and oversight from the adults around me, my grades improved. And so this is something that I try to tell people.

[A]

All the data tells us this, but you've got like the actual experience, right?

[B]

And what I think a lot of people misunderstand about, you know, having a smart kid. You know, a kid can be smart, but that may be. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient to do well in school. So even if you have the raw ingredients, you know, a kid who's bright and curious and all those things, things that, that, you know, I had, to some extent, I was so weighed down by everything around me in the foster system. So we can. Yeah, we can talk about that.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I want to kind of back up a little bit. Well, first, I mean, so, I mean, you're obviously. Maybe not obvious, but it seems to me, just from our brief conversation, you're close with your. Your adopted family, right? I mean, they're still. Are. Yes, but there was. It sounds like there was still trouble. I mean, just maybe, maybe typical family, middle class trouble. I don't know. We'll get to that. But I want to. I want to know. I think a lot of people want to know about our foster system. And just as a politician, this is. This irks me because it's not really a federal issue, and it's not what I'm really well versed in. And we know it's problematic. We all know. Like, I've looked at wanting to adopt, and it's hard to adopt. I mean, I'm curious how your family even did it from a middle class. It costs a lot of money. It's. It's hard. So it's. God, there are so many questions there. But, you know, moving from home to home. I've heard horror stories of foster. Fostering. Maybe the foster parents are bad or. And, you know, I've heard of a case, my wife's friend, and they were foster parents, and, you know, they had this kid ripped away from them to go back to their mother, who is a terrible, terrible mother. Like, the. This child is like, crying and screaming like, please don't take me back. Like, you know, they wanted to stay with their foster parents, and they got out of fostering because of it. It was so. It was so just destructive to their psyche that they. Because losing this child and knowing what was happening, and they were helpless. My neighbor is a foster parent back in Houston, and she's a wonderful lady. And, you know, just. But I don't know much more about it than that. Why do you even get transferred from family to family? How does that even work?

[B]

Well, on that point, one reason why this occurs is kind of related to what you just described. So often what happens is that someone from the family of origin emerges to take the kid back to the family. So you have a kid who, you know, let's say he has a mother who's a drug addict. The kid's placed into care, maybe the mother sobers up, the father reenters the picture. A grandmother shows up, an aunt. Someone says, okay, I can take custody of the child, but in the meantime, if that Child has been living with the same foster home for a year, two years, three years, they're often extremely reluctant to leave and go back to this new caregiver or back to their mother who may be abusive or neglectful.

[A]

Or any other bad memories. This is kind of like the situation I just described.

[B]

Right, exactly. And, and so, and also from the perspective of the foster parents, they're often reluctant to give up custody and they'll find sort of legal means.

[A]

They become attached.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like, why don't. I can't. Can they not adopt? I go, I don't know.

[B]

Well, the law sort of favors the blood relatives.

[A]

Right, Right. And that's what happened in this case. It's like the law as it. This is what's hard as policymakers, because it should.

[B]

There's no perfect answer, but.

[A]

But it really is case by case and relies on perfect judgment, which humans don't have. You know, I want the law to favor, you know, like, I think, what if I got really screwed up and lost my kid? Of course I want the law to be on my side to get my kid back one. You know, and so I get that that's hard. I don't know if it varies state by state or.

[B]

Yeah, well, at least in the way that it worked in California was, you know, the organic solution to this was to basically move the child frequently to different homes so that attachment never forms. And, and so what do you think about that?

[A]

So that's why you move so much.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Just by law. That's how they do it.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. And so in this case. So maybe that strategy.

[A]

And I'm not sure if that's a bad idea or a good idea. What do you think? I mean, well, lived it.

[B]

So I think it's. I mean, you know, they're all bad ideas. Right. But, but maybe it's the least.

[A]

Okay, there's, there's, there's. They're all bad. Some are worse than others.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Characterize it that way.

[B]

So it may be the least bad in certain situations, like you said, case by case. So if there is a father available or a grandmother, an aunt or someone, then maybe it's not the worst thing for the child to not form strong attachments to any of the foster parents because you want the kid to go back with their blood relatives. In my case, it was maybe one of the worst. Because there was no chance you were coming back. No, no.

[A]

So she.

[B]

That was. Believe it or not, that was not her first run in with law enforcement, and so she was deported Back to South Korea. And I was.

[A]

Back when I bordered people for crimes.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. But at least at that point, the foster system in LA was overburdened. I'm sure it still is. And so I kind of got absorbed into this bureaucratic system where no one actually learned that, oh, this guy, this kid is never going back.

[A]

He's never going to have a blood.

[B]

Relative, and so let's just put him for adoption right away. It wasn't until my seventh foster home, where at a certain point every so often.

[A]

But you're not automatically put up for adoption.

[B]

No.

[A]

So that's. That's on the caseworkers.

[B]

Yes. Yeah. Social workers.

[A]

And again, it's like, I don't know, I hate. We hate. I hate this problem because I'm like, what law do you pass to fix that? Like, the law is already there.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's just. It's just bad management.

[B]

Yeah, bad management and maybe not enough staffing or resources and then too many kids in the system where it becomes very difficult, I think, to tailor it case by case.

[A]

So you're just left in, like, this purgatory.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

For how many years?

[B]

Five years.

[A]

And how many different. Seven homes, seven families at a stage in life. That's pretty important from a developmental perspective.

[B]

Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. For a developmental perspective.

[A]

Which is why you didn't want to start your story that way.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because it is like, it's hard.

[B]

Yeah. And I tell those stories from the first two or three homes that I lived in, where, of course, you know, being torn from my mother was hard and being taken into this home that.

[A]

I didn't still your mom, even though, you know. Yeah.

[B]

And then the next home. And the next home. But then eventually, you know, I sort of shut down emotionally. You know, the body finds ways to cope with this intense stress. Especially as a kid when you don't really understand what's going on. Yeah, I lost.

[A]

I mean, I kind of can kind of relate. My mom died when I was 10.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's hard on it.

[A]

It's very different. It's a little bit apples and oranges, but it's. Yeah, you shut off your emotions.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. You learn to deal with, become a seal.

[A]

I guess it helps you in politics, but it's not healthy.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there. Yeah. There are healthy and less healthy ways to deal with it. I think some of the things that I described when I was a teenager. Less healthy. And so, you know, moving to these different homes and, you know, eventually Adopted. And you asked me earlier, am I still close with my adoptive family? And the answer is yes. For.

[A]

I mean, you keep calling them adoptive, you know, you just call them. Do you normally. Is that just for the sake of us speaking?

[B]

Yeah, to be clear, for this information. Yeah.

[A]

Be calling your family.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, my sister's my sister, my mom's my mom. But you know, to make clear in the book and in everyday conversation, just.

[A]

So people understand who you're talking about, because otherwise it'd be confusing.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah, you guys are, they're your family.

[B]

Yeah, that's how I feel about it. But not about my adoptive. Well, former adoptive father. So my adoptive parents.

[A]

Okay, so you had multiple adoptions.

[B]

Oh, no, no. So, so it's the same family. Okay. But about a year and a half into the adoption.

[A]

Sorry, I'm still, I'm still focused on the foster care system.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

If you don't mind. No, not at all. Was there, was there anything that stuck out? It was just. Did you have any really bad experiences, if you don't mind me asking, with any of those, like, were there some who just shouldn't be foster parents at all? And like, how did they even get this job? Because, I mean, it is a job. You do get paid. There's a stipend of some sorts. Right?

[B]

It's.

[A]

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure, but so.

[B]

Yes, there was never outright, you know, physical abuse, but there was a ton of neglect. So some of the homes I lived in had upwards of eight or ten kids living in them. And so. And these were kind of, you know, I stayed in apartments or duplexes or.

[A]

Very rich people with eight or ten bedrooms. That's what's interesting. Right?

[B]

It's like two bedroom.

[A]

Because there is a financial benefit.

[B]

Yeah. You get a stipend for each child you take in. And so, yeah, if you can squeeze eight kids into your two bedroom home, then, you know, so much the better.

[A]

So. Because, because we don't have enough people fostering.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So essentially it's not like we like that. It's, I guess, caseworkers, in their defense, I suppose, like you should look at that and say no, but if you don't have anywhere else to put them, what do you do?

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's either. Yeah. In this overcrowded home or on the street.

[A]

Has that improved over time you study this issue?

[B]

If anything, it's, it's gotten worse. It's probably at least as bad as it was 25, 30 years ago. At least in LA, there was a story out of NPR. This was a few years ago now that the number of kids in foster homes as a result of parental drug addiction has doubled since the year 2000. And a lot of that is due to the opioid crisis.

[A]

But we haven't. But number of kids has doubled. But does that come with a requisite doubling of foster families?

[B]

No, no, no. I mean, I mean maybe a few more, you know, but I don't think it's.

[A]

I don't think what would from a policy perspective. Again, I think this is state led. If I'm not.

[B]

I think it's state.

[A]

We don't like, we don't do foster care legislation here. I haven't seen it in seven years. It's a, it's a state issue. But is there, are there incentives that you look at in your studies that would increase and incentivize higher quality and just higher quantity of foster care parents?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know if there's necessarily a policy solution, you know, because you could think of something like economic incentives. But then the type of people who would be attracted to the economic incentive may not be the types of people that you want. You know, if you want sort of people who have like empty nesters or something like that and they have a home and space available. And I do know people like this and there does. I mean anecdotally I've noticed increasing numbers of soldiers, well off older people, retirees and so forth who were taking in foster kids. But you know, it's hard to persuade people to do this because of the aforementioned issues with attachment where you take.

[A]

The only thing is increasing the money they get.

[B]

Yeah, maybe.

[A]

I don't know if there's any study on that that shows.

[B]

Yeah, I'm unfamiliar with the study that you know, causally leads to more people being interested in this. I mean ideally we would want to work from the other end of this, which is reducing the number of kids in homes in the first place.

[A]

And of course, so yeah, so yeah, the problem with that is, you know, like a lot of messed up people and you know, I mean I do. One of my main focuses in congress is the battling the drug cartels.

[B]

Yeah, like.

[A]

Well, what about the demand side, Dan? And I'm like one, I can't solve every problem. So I'm looking, I focus just on the supply side. And because supply does create demand. That's my argument. But also I'm not sure I'll ever solve the human need for self destruction. I will never Solve that. It's just not possible. And I think it's something we just have to accept. There's mitigating factors, but it's like, you know, the war on drugs is like, it was never going to win or lose. It was always mitigation, you know, defending, like, stopping illegal immigration at the border. It's about mitigating. So every problem is often about mitigation. And I'm open to ideas on how we could, but, you know, and I think that's maybe what you get at in your book.

[B]

Well, I mean, there have been successful public awareness campaigns for tobacco use, for example. Yeah. So there were, you know, I mean, up until the 1980s, something like 40% of American adults smoked cigarettes. And now it's something like 12%, dramatic decline. And part of that was just this concerted effort at the sort of the political.

[A]

So what would that look like in the case of, like, drug use? I mean, God, we've had so many. I mean, I'm not sure I can find one drug addict who's like, thing. Like, well, no, the drugs are good for me. Like, like, they know it's bad for them. They do it because it feels good.

[B]

Yeah, well, I think that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, one. One reason why tobacco use declined was kind of social stigma. But in many ways, our society has gone the opposite, where we've attempted to destigmatize everything.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And sometimes I'll make this joke that if only we had simply destigmatized tobacco use and been kinder to smokers, then we could have actually eliminated smoking altogether. But instead we decided to stigmatize it. And look what happened. Well, look what happened, actually. Fewer people smoke cigarettes as a result of this. And so I think some of those tools, if they can be used wisely to get people to stop smoking, or rather just to stop using drugs, but for their drugs.

[A]

Stop being abusive, stop being a bad person. Makes you lose your kids. That's really tough.

[B]

And this is something. In the later chapters of the book, I talk about this idea that a lot of people have been interested in luxury beliefs, which I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on credentialed elites while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society. And one of these would be the idea that we should decriminalize all drugs. And I cite certain things.

[A]

Climate change is another big one.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, climate change and open borders to defund the police. But on the drug thing specifically, I share data indicating that most Americans are against decriminalization. Of all drugs anyway. But then when you break down the data by education level, more than 60% of college graduates are in favor of decriminalizing drugs, Whereas less than half of people with a high school diploma are in favor of decriminalizing drugs. Actually, the higher you go in education and socioeconomic status, the more people.

[A]

Because the feeling is, like, I can deal with it because, you know, I've had a good upbringing. I know my left and right limits. So let me just relax on a Tuesday night. That's, I mean, that's what I hear from people who want it, whatever it is, to be decriminalized. They're like, yeah, I'm an adult, Dan. Like, why are you telling me what to do? And I'm like, yeah, I get that argument. I, I, it depends on what we're talking about when we talk about decriminalizing, but let's take marijuana, for instance. And I'm like, look, I'm not gonna die on this hill either way.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I do, you know, I do have parents in my district who are like, can you just not make it easier for my kids to get drugs? Like, it's already hard enough to be a parent in this day and age. Just not make it easier, please? And I, you know, so there's that side of it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

On the other hand, is those the same parents might want to relax at the end of the day. Like, it's, it's, it. Marijuana is its own category. But when you're talking about decriminalizing, like, the really serious drugs, I mean, that's just crazy. You know, we've seen, I think we've already seen the results. And if you're like, well, what about Portugal or something? But it's like, it's like a tiny country with very specific, I mean, look at Oregon.

[B]

They decriminalized drugs, and then they rapidly recriminalized because they saw the number of public overdoses and the rising dysfunction and disorder.

[A]

Basically decriminalize theft. Under 900, gonna be a lot of $899 thefts. And that's exactly what happened. Like, I don't know.

[B]

So, yeah, to your earlier point, and it's a good point, that, you know, there's not a drug addict. Well, I didn't know this was bad for me. But there are a lot of people, I think, who are kind of on the margin, and if suddenly it becomes more accessible. That's true. You're going to increase the number.

[A]

Supply creates demand. I think that's back to my point. Like, that's why I kind of focus.

[B]

On supply creates demand and supply creates. And then sort of the laws and the amount of friction to acquire it. So I'm sure you've seen some of the stats on the number of kids who are.

[A]

That's why I use mitigation. Like the war on drugs is a mitigation strategy. Like, if I can get. Just get one less drug dealer into that school.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's. That's a dozen less kids that are going to be addicted for the rest of their lives and then overdose 20 years later. Which is what. Like, we see that a lot in the northeast. And, you know, I've seen that in my wife's high school and not so much in. Well, I actually grew up in Colombia, so that's a whole different drug capital of the world. But we don't. Not a lot of drugs done by students, honestly. But in, you know, one drug dealer gets into this high school one and gets a bunch of kids addicted to whatever oxy or whatever it is. They don't die.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But 15 years later, now they've got kids of their own. They're living normal lives. They're like, I can probably take like whatever 40 milligrams like I used to. No, you can't, because you haven't. Your tolerance isn't the same. And now you're dead. You just left two kids behind. Like, I've literally seen that. And, and that's. That is. It's. It's just heartbreaking. The supply created that, though.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if you're addicted at a young age, there's a lot of science behind that. If you're addicted at a young age, it just is a demon that just will not let you go. It's much different if you're addicted later. I think 26 is the generally understood cut off.

[B]

Yeah. And, you know, the family structure has something to do with that as well. Where there was a study a few years ago which found they compared kids raised in stable, intact families with kids. Kids raised in unstable families. And what they found is that for poor children who were raised in stable, intact homes, they were less likely to become addicted to substances as teenagers compared with rich kids raised in unstable, un. Intact homes.

[A]

Seems intuitive.

[B]

Yeah. But I think a lot of people think, oh, well, the issue is families. Maybe they don't have enough in the way of resources. Funding cash transfers will help this.

[A]

It's about attention.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's about how engaged. Yeah. I mean, rich kids. You don't need to tell me that study. I would assume that study is true. Just because one. Well, you can afford more drugs because you're rich.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And your family's not intact, your parents aren't paying attention versus a, you know, a poor family that's like. But they're solid.

[B]

Yes. Yeah.

[A]

And it obviously makes a difference. It's everything. But how do we create that? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of like. That's your whole goal here. Right. Is like giving us solutions and how do we create strong families? Because we know that's the genesis of most problems.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And yeah. A lot of it, I think, starts with family. Early, early in life, early family environment. And you know, I share some statistics on the foster care system. So, you know, a lot of people, you know, they'll focus on something like college graduation rates. It's a number that people kind of intuitively understand. And it's a measure to some extent of success. And so the average graduation rate, or the overall graduation rate rather, in the U.S. something like 38% of adults over the age of 25 in the U.S. have a bachelor's degree. 38%. Now, if you look at kids in the bottom income quintile, so children in low income families, 11% of them get bachelor's degrees, much lower than the 38% overall. But then if you look at foster kids, the number is 3%. 3% of children in the foster system will go on to graduate from college. So in other words, a child in a poor family in the US is four times more likely to graduate from college than a child in foster care. And the families in foster care, they're not poor because you have to meet some minimal threshold in order to become a foster parent. And then you get a stipend and so forth. So this suggests, like you said, it's about attention, it's about oversight, it's not stability.

[A]

I think that's because we're trying to extrapolate what the meaning of that statistic. It seems to me that it's the notion of stability.

[B]

Yeah, it's about stability. And this has been measured in research in developmental psychology. So when developmental psychologists look at childhood outcomes, things like graduation rates, likelihood of substance abuse, drinking and driving, incarceration, and so forth, and they want to look at what predicts those outcomes. One variable they look at is what they call childhood harshness, which is essentially low income, growing up. So you know how poor your family was. And what they find is that the relationship between childhood income in the family and those outcomes later in life, incarceration rates, drinking and driving, substance abuse and so forth is a very small correlation. And some studies find no connection at all between family income and those outcomes. So just family income. Yeah. But then when researchers look at this other variable, they call it childhood instability or childhood unpredictability. And this is measured by things like how frequently did you relocate when you were growing up? How many different romantic partners did your primary caregiver have when you were a child, how much uncertainty there was in your day to day life. They find a strong and consistent effect. And these are very large effects in this kind of research. And even when researchers control for family income, they still find that early childhood instability significantly predicts those detrimental outcomes later in life. And so there's not going to be like a magic bullet, quick fix for something like this. It took decades to get to this point where you see the kind of family deterioration. One statistic that I point out in the book is that if you go back to 1960, 95% of American children were raised by both of their birth parents, regardless of social class.

[A]

Wildly high number.

[B]

And that that was the case for most western countries.

[A]

If you made me guess, I would have said that. Was that back then? Maybe 70%. That's what I would have guessed.

[B]

No, Yeah, I, I think I probably would have shared the same intuition. But it was 95. And this was for rich kids and poor kids alike. In 1960, there was a. That was the unspoken.

[A]

It was a culture. I mean, it was a different culture.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Now it's a culture of like, well, I can just let go of this trap. I mean, I can just kind of.

[B]

Yeah. Do my own thing.

[A]

I gotta live my own life, you know, liberated, whatever. I don't even know what the. Or just people are just. I don't know. Yeah, so what about the fatherless? Because what we talk about a lot is, you know, the not having a. You talk about instability, which can mean a lot of different things. What I think is normally talked about, especially in conservative circles, should be talked about in all political circles. It shouldn't be political at all. But they focus on the fatherless home specifically. Did you find the same thing or is that just getting mixed in with the general instability?

[B]

I mean, it gets. Yeah, that's one of the measures of instability is did you have a father in the home? And just to finish up that earlier point, so, 1960, 95% of kids across the board. If you Fast forward to 2005 for kids in upper and upper middle class families, this is basically the top 20% of income those kids, it dropped from 95% in 1960 to 85% in 2005.

[A]

That's actually not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

[B]

So slight dip, but still the overwhelming majority of kids raised in that sort of upper income quintile for working class and poor kids. So these are kids in the bottom 30% of income. It went from 95% in 1960 to 30% by 2005. So there's this sort of dramatic divergence along class lines where most kids from well to do families, they still intact families are the norm. And even if they themselves have divorced parents, which some do their neighborhoods, I.

[A]

Was like, that doesn't reconcile with what I believe the divorce rate is, which is higher than that. We're defining it as a family where they like, yeah, they're divorced, but mom lives down the street. And like there's, there's a normal, there's some normalcy.

[B]

Yes. And that divorce rate, it's, you know, you have these aggregate snapshot statistics of the divorce rates, like 40%, something like that. But that's largely, not entirely, but largely concentrated in lower income environments. Now you see it in sort of middle class, upper middle class families, but there's much more.

[A]

So I mean, Congress is also pretty damn bad.

[B]

So I saw it in the Air Force as well. Well, just a lot of young people getting married a little too soon and then divorcing. But how do we help to resolve this? I think part of it is speaking more openly about it. I think so much of our culture is attempting to do the opposite. Like we were talking about before, of, oh, I need to get away, I need to do my own thing. I need to be liberated and just to tell this story. So since this book has come out so far, two different guys have approached me, two different readers, both in their, I think, probably late 30s, you know, young families. They had wives and kids. And they both told me essentially the same story, which was, you know, hey, I was, you know, I was kind of getting bored in my marriage. I had these kids. And I'm thinking, you know, is this, you know, is this really what where I'm supposed to be in my life? You know, one of them was telling me he started to get a wandering eye, maybe thinking about other, you know, other women. And then both of them said, you know, I read your book and I realized, like, I think I was just being selfish, you know, like, I kind of wanted to just check out and do my own thing. And then I read your book and realized that was not, that's not what I should be doing. Not to my kids, not to my wife. And then they both recommitted to their marriages. One guy told me he was honest with his wife, they went into couples therapy, they're still married. And I'm just a guy who wrote a book, have a substack, you know. And I thought to myself, you know, what if, you know, sort of more public figures, more, you know, widely read media and so forth, kind of had that same message of. Obviously there are cases when divorce makes sense, when, you know, life can be messy, people are complicated. I understand that.

[A]

It's better for the kid.

[B]

Yeah, totally. But then in those cases like these guys are describing, where you just have a guy who's kind of bored and kind of wants to do something else. I think in those cases, you know, what if instead of reading my book or if he had read my book, my book, the message was, you know, be independent, do your own thing and you know, be true to yourself or something like that. They would have taken it. That's the message that a lot of.

[A]

People are like, right on the line.

[B]

Right. And there are probably a lot of people who are on that line who aren't in, you know, what they call, like high conflict marriages. Abusive. They're just in kind of, you know, it's stagnation or something. But when you open the pages of, you know, our most prestigious magazines and newspapers and so forth, you also go on social media.

[A]

Look at the fake lives. I could potentially live.

[B]

Try, try to polycule. Try an open marriage. Try polyamory. Try this. You know, maybe, maybe you can have an unconscious, a conscious uncoupling and have a good time. Have you heard this? Conscious uncoupling?

[A]

You all do. Explain that one to me.

[B]

It's something like essentially like, we've both agreed on this decision and so we're both going to live our lives apart, but like get along amicably. It's not going to be.

[A]

Yeah. Kind of like an open relationship. We're going to raise the kids together.

[B]

Yeah. It's like divorce for. It's like a high status divorce for rich people. You know, there's also this idea of nesting.

[A]

Yeah. So they don't technically get a divorce and.

[B]

Yeah, well, I think, I think they do get divorced, but it's more so it's going to be amicable and we're not going to be in each other's faces or, or be getting, getting into personal conflict about it.

[A]

Be that way, I guess.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They're often Not.

[B]

Yeah, but you hear that phrase toss.

[A]

I've never heard of. But okay. Conscious, uncomplicated. That sounds very elitist.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it is.

[A]

It's like. Do you mean divorce? Yeah, we mean divorce.

[B]

Well, because divorce is declasse.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so you have to say, oh, consciousness. Yeah, but that is the kind of cultural messaging I think people get. You give people this thought experiment where imagine you have a kid in comfortable upper middle class family, maybe there's a divorced family or two in the neighborhood, but generally their model of what a relationship looks like is a stable marriage. And two parents, college educated, they work hard and so forth. But then the kid opens social media or looks at Netflix or glossy magazine and is seeing all this stuff about how much fun it would be to maybe experiment with drugs a little bit or try out novel relationship arrangements, sleep around a little bit, how fun and exciting that might be. But those messages are counterbalanced by what the kid is seeing in his or her everyday life. You're seeing responsible adults and so forth and stable marriages. But now you could imagine a kid who grew up the way that I did, or like my friends did, where you don't really see stable families.

[A]

Yeah, Because, I mean, I cut you off when you started talking about your adopted father because I wanted to ask you more about your foster care system. So maybe, maybe let's go back to that.

[B]

Yeah. And so, yeah, the way that I grew up, which was unstable. And, you know, so my adoptive parents, about a year and a half into the adoption, they got a divorce and my adoptive mother got custody of me. And as a result of this, my adoptive father was very mad at my mother for leaving him, decided to stop speaking with me as a way to retaliate against her. And as you can imagine.

[A]

How old are you?

[B]

I was a nine year old boy at this point.

[A]

Built some attachment to this guy.

[B]

No, no. Yeah. I called him Dad. I thought of him as my dad. Yeah.

[A]

And why, Why'd she leave him?

[B]

Well, no, no, no, not at all. Well, it's all.

[A]

Assume you're right about it. Yeah.

[B]

Well, so. So yeah, he stopped speaking with me. And after not knowing my biological father, all the homes and then having a dad and then not having a dad.

[A]

Did he speak with your sister?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he did. Well, that was his daughter, you know, his biological daughter. And so just a couple of months after this, why did your mom leave him? I'm getting to that right now. Yeah. And so a couple months after this, my mother, I'm nine years old at this point, she sits me down and she tells me that she is in love with a woman now. And so. Yeah, and plot thickens. Yeah. So then they have a relationship, my mother and this woman named Shelley. And actually, once I got over the initial shock, because this was 1999, gay LGBT stuff, it was not nearly as pervasive as it is now. And so this blew my nine year old mind. I'm like, whoa, two women together. But I was nine. I got over it. And they raised me together into my adolescence. And it was, you know, overall, like a pretty stable and bright point in my early childhood.

[A]

This is a. How did your mom end up with full custody? I mean, I'd be pissed if I was your dad, too. I mean.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the law kind of favors that. And there's a lot of angry. There's a lot of really depressed men out there who lost their kids, maybe unfairly. How do we deal with that? What do you. I mean, in your experience, was that justice or should it have been split custody? Like, what?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think if you had asked me at that point, I would have said, you know, split custody. I would have loved to, at that point, continued to have the relationship with the guy I was calling my dad by now. I mean, after. After learning that, you know, he was. He was that upset at my mother and kind of used me in that way. I'm, you know, my.

[A]

My estimation, he knew that the reason was she'd become a lesbian and was dating this other woman.

[B]

Not at the time. Not when they divorced.

[A]

He just. You just thought she was leaving him.

[B]

Yeah, she was unhappy or whatever.

[A]

I mean, obviously. Okay, so, yeah, I. I mean, let's try to. I mean, I'm trying to. Yeah, maybe I'll try to get your opinion more generally, in your experience. I can see why you're like, yeah, screw this guy. He used you as a. Yeah. I don't know how that gets back at your mom, but.

[B]

Well, she was. She was hurt by this. I mean, of course, because she knew that I was attached to him and she saw my response when he wouldn't, you know, take my calls or, you.

[A]

Know, have, you know, it's terrible.

[B]

Let me stay over.

[A]

So they at least had some relationship where he could visit. I don't know. It's different with every family.

[B]

Well, because he still had a relationship with my sister, and so he still had, you know, some contact with my mother because of that, and they're talking about my sister and so forth. But I think generally, you know, the broader point About. No, I think, I think, yeah, kids need their fathers. And as evident I had that response, losing contact, it hurts kids. And yeah, they need a dad in their lives. And I know guys like this who have been mistreated by the system and feel like just because they're the father and not the mother, they're not.

[A]

Yeah, it's just this kind of BS idea that like one is more important than the other. They're equally important.

[B]

Especially once for boys, once you get into sort of those adolescent and teenage years.

[A]

Especially for girls too. Yeah, I'm sorry. Just being a girl dad myself, like, I just can't imagine either of us being totally out of her life. It would be bad. Like can't let your hatred for each other overcome what's the well being of the child. And that just happens too often.

[B]

Yeah. And there's also something interesting here. I mean this, the, the numbers are too small, I think to, to, to draw too much from this. But one interesting finding from the research is that kids from single dad homes do not fare as poorly as kids from single mother homes. But the number, again, there's way more kids raised by single moms than single dads. And so it's hard to compare. And sometimes the reason why dads are single isn't because of divorce, but because the mother passed away. Because, as you know, the court system favors the mother usually. So if there is no mother, the kids go to the dad by default. But there is something interesting there, and I'm not sure entirely what make of that, of why it is that single fathers seem to, you know, for whatever reason, their kids don't, don't seem to.

[A]

I mean, there's enough of a data pool to make. How much of a difference are we talking?

[B]

I mean, it's, it's pretty substantial. So.

[A]

And it goes back to my initial question because it goes fatherless homes, where we. Fatherless homes. I mean, for some reason that masculine entity is important, right?

[B]

That, yeah, that presence. And yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a stability.

[A]

I mean, you need the love and affection, you know, again, you need both. Right.

[B]

And, but you also need a bit of discipline as well. And you know, one reason why I brought up the boy thing is because, you know, once boys reach the point where physically they are larger than the mom, they're far less likely to listen and to obey. But if there's a male presence in the home, you know, they have the dad around, then there's always that underlying, you know, like, I should do it, you know, what my parents are Telling me, you know, so. Yeah, and then that because boys can be so impulsive and behave so and so erratically, it can sometimes you need that. And think about my friends growing up. None of us were raised in those kinds of intact homes. I was the only one. So I had five close friends growing up. And none of us were raised by married parents. So I had friends raised by single moms. One friend was raised by a single dad, and actually it was him and his brother. They actually turned out okay, interestingly, whereas my friends raised by single moms lives are more messy. And another friend raised by his grandmother because his dad was in prison, his mom was on drugs. And this is like a very common portrait of what a lot of families look like in working class communities all across the country. And so, you know, and I write about this in order to basically communicate to people like, you know, if you want to have kids, you have a responsibility to them and so forth. And by the time I reached high school, there was just so much chaos and drama and everything weighing me down that I graduated with a 2.2 GPA, barely graduate, C minus, kind of average.

[A]

Where did you end up in high school?

[B]

So this was in Red Bluff. Red Bluff, California.

[A]

Where's Red Bluff?

[B]

It's about four hours, three hours north of Sacramento, something like that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

No, no, it's way away. Yeah, this is very rural, very Republican. When I checked the statistics for 2024, it was something like 77. Yeah, 77% went for the Republicans. So very blue collar town. And yeah, by the time I was 17, this was 2007. The war was war in Iraq, Afghanistan. The military was more of an option, as you well know. And so that seemed to be the pathway for me was the only ways that people got out of that town. You know, you either go off to college or you join the military. And So I was 17 and kind of this unfocused, immature kid.

[A]

We're kind of right about that. I'm going to quote you here. The natural state of young males is apathy, self indulgence and laziness. Is that true? I mean, I don't know. I don't know.

[B]

I mean, I think we're seeing that now, Congressman. I mean, if you look at young guys, I mean, what are they doing? There's a lot of, you know, hitting the dab pen and gambling, sports apps and video games and porn.

[A]

We'd have to have a control group to really know that for sure. But I mean, it. It feel. Yeah, I get it. It feel. It feels that way, you know, it's hard to generalize, but.

[B]

Well, there was a. There's a very interesting book.

[A]

Left your own devices, you'll be an apathetic, lazy loser. You might be right. I don't know. Without any guidance. I don't know. Maybe that's true.

[B]

Well, I think this is one reason, among others, there's a very interesting book by this anthropologist, David Gilmore. He wrote a book called Manhood in the Making. And he basically surveyed cultures all over the world, especially pre industrial small scale societies, what in a less politically correct time, they called primitive societies. And in these societies, every single one of them had rituals in place to shepherd boys into men. And he quotes a lot of the people in these communities, a lot of the leaders and so forth, and they say, like, boys don't want to do anything. Like they're naturally lazy and you have to force. It's a culturally achieved title. And one of the points that he makes in the book is a lot of these societies, there's kind of a biological threshold for women for when girls become women. You know, it's very clear. Like once you're able to produce children, that's kind of. In these communities, when you're considered a woman, it's just a biological process. You reach this age and now you're a woman. For boys, it's not the same. It's not as if you magically, you know, you turn 15 and you're magically a man or something. It's. You have to go through these stages of intense struggle, hardship, you know, kind of hazing processes. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like the walkabout or whatever.

[B]

Yeah. You have to like, you know, kill a wild animal or you have to endure.

[A]

That's what we gotta. You're right. We gotta bring this stuff back.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

That is lacking. Unless you join the military. Unless you go to like, you know, we kind of did that.

[B]

I think sports has something.

[A]

Sports is helpful.

[B]

Yeah, Sports or, you know, Boy Scouts. I don't know what's going on with Boy Scouts now, but I think back in the day that was helpful.

[A]

I think it's fine. I deal with a lot of Boy Scouts.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

It's still okay, but it's. I think so. I don't know. I'm like canceled for saying that. But like, in my experience, at least where I live, like, like, you know, Boy Scouts is the Scouts. That's the only thing that changes from what I can tell. But no, I mean, like, I have a whole chapter in my book called do something hard. Yeah, right. And it's so fundamentally true. And it's not like, and I don't mean go swim with sharks, that's just doing something dangerous. That's not what I mean. I mean do something that is challenging to yourself and that's, that is dependent on you. Like I could say, well, my challenge is going through buzz. Well, that ain't gonna work for everybody. Okay. You know, maybe your challenge, maybe something hard is like, it could be making up with an old friend.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, interesting.

[A]

You know what I mean? Like that's just something challenging. Maybe it's a cold shower every day.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Just something to remind yourself that you are strong.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That you can be if you choose to be.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. The cold showers and the cold plunge thing, it's so interesting because most of the people I know who are into that are people who in their, their daily lives are pretty comfortable and now they're finding ways to force themselves to do something uncomfortable. You know.

[A]

Cold plunge, sauna. Yeah. And it's I. The cold plunge therapies, you know, I'm not sure how beneficial it is. I think there's definitely an anti inflammatory.

[B]

Response, I think psychologically.

[A]

But it's really about like, can I sit in 30 degree water for five minutes?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Turns out, yeah, I can.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I know I've already done that, like proven that to myself. But sometimes you just gotta, even as a seal, you know. Yeah. Just because I did it in Alaska and training doesn't mean I shouldn't, you know, keep up the mental, the, the, the mental strengthening occasionally.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so I bought a freezer fridge and made it really nice. And now that's my cold plunge. And by the way, that's how you should do it. Don't go buying these 8000$. It's ridiculous. Just buy a freezer and just trust me on this one. Okay. So challenges.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Let's go back to the anthropological studies that you were talk and yeah. That's, that is something we sort of.

[B]

We've lost that I lack.

[A]

Right. People start talking about like what if there was some so hard to put into policy but like national service requirement.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But it's not, you know, if you, if you take the military out because you can't do that to the military. It's just we can't take that many people to mess it all up. We're not a tiny nation like Israel or you know, Colombia, but there's a lot of other ways to serve, you know, and whether it's just, it's in my high school, we Were we had to do so many hours of community service. You know, I went to high school in Bogota, Columbia. So there's a lot of other weird things. Oil and gas business. My dad. We would live down there all four years of high school. But our own said that was hard in other ways, I guess, but still a comfortable elite, you know, school. And, yeah, they made them do community service. Technically, they're all supposed to join the military as well, if you're a Colombian, but we don't have anything like that. And this. This crisis of manhood is like. Is really. I mean, I see it all day because they're. They're my trolls on Twitter. I mean. I mean, you laugh, but I like. It really is. You know, I get a few too, and. And there's people trying to speak to them, like you. Jordan Peterson really tries to speak to this. I think his books really help that group. And, you know, I don't know if I'm doing. I think my book would be helpful to it as well. It's a bit more broad than just manhood, but how do you fix it?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't really talk that much about sort of manhood, specifically in the book, you know, I talk a little bit about something called the young male syndrome.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And this phrase coined by a couple of psychologists back in the 80s, and basically, they show consistently regardless of whatever society you're looking at. You know, everywhere from Finland to Malaysia to Zimbabwe to Japan, whenever you look at, you know, which group in this society is causing the most sort of mayhem, you know, who's responsible for most of the arrests and misconduct, and it's young men, usually aged 18 to 22. And, you know, that age group, that's the group that requires some kind of discipline, some kind of guidance, some guardrails, mentorship and so on. And I talk about this where I actually really disliked the first maybe three or four years that I was in the Air Force.

[A]

What did you do in the Air Force?

[B]

I was an electronic warfare technician, fixing missile warning systems and radars and so on. But this first few years, you're kind of living on base, a lot of oversight. It kind of sucks. And when you're 18, 19 years old, you want to meet girls, but there are no very few, at least on a base. And so I just felt miserable.

[A]

If you're gonna meet any girls, at least join the Air Force.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, they're more there than.

[A]

Other branches are on the SEAL teams.

[B]

Well, yeah, yeah.

[A]

But at least we live in San Diego. So. Yeah, actually, my wife. In San Diego.

[B]

Yeah. No, I had a. I had a friend who's a Marine who's in San Diego, and he had good things to say. And. And so. But. But that was the environment that I needed to be in, even though subjectively I'm like, God, this sucks. Why did I do this? Like, what was I thinking? But, yeah, it was. It was exactly what I needed.

[A]

The structure.

[B]

Yeah. The. I mean, you know, that level of oversight and, you know, every. Everything how you wear your uniform and all this stuff.

[A]

The military, I mean, it's.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Very passionate about protecting it as an institution.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I like to see us doing that now.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I think.

[B]

No, it saved me. I think it's. Yeah, it's.

[A]

I think, you know, people complain about Pete Hegseth. Qualified or this or that. The whole point of Pete Hegseth, and he's a friend of mine, so I just, you know, support him, and he's done a great. He was meant to go in as a culture warrior. That was the purpose, and I think it was needed.

[B]

Well, everyone else was a culture warrior, too, but they just. The media never framed it that way.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like, they were never portrayed that way. But, you know, when you're trying to do social experiments in the military, that's a culture warrior.

[A]

Culture the wrong way.

[B]

Yeah. Well, there's this weird shell game that people play where if you do something that most people disagree with, that's fine, but then when you start to push back against it, they say, oh, you're doing a culture war. You know?

[A]

Yeah, it's true. It's like bs but you know what? I think most Americans agree with our side of that argument. Honestly, it's because it's intuitive.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I mean, and like I said, I keep close touch with anyone in the military, all my friends, and everybody welcomes the new commercials. I would tell the, you want to increase recruiting, Just do more badass commercials. It's honestly that simple.

[B]

And we're seeing numbers increase, right?

[A]

Yeah, we hit our numbers. We're doing well.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And, you know, before this administration, you know, there was this worry of, like, well, we're going to. If we go that route, then it's. You know, it might appease, like, a certain number of people, but then we're going to lose all these others who could be, you know, great technicians. And I'm like, I don't care. I want to lose the people who. Who. Who think they're joining, you know, some. I don't know, just training program. Yeah. I Think they're joining some like safe space. Yeah, that's, that's not what you think you should be joining. You should, you should be joining for adventure. And, and you should be very, very much in mind that you have the potential to go to war again. If you don't join with that mentality then we, I don't want you there. And so our marketing should reflect that and it doesn't. And look at that. Recruitment numbers are way up.

[B]

Yeah. I wrote this piece for the Free Press a few years ago. There was this seeming, this pattern of young new recruits who were leaking secrets or they were publicly badmouthing the US And I suggested that one reason is because their recruitment strategy has been so focused on the individual. It's very selfish. It's about, well, it's going to pay for your college. It's going to give you this. It's going to give, it's all about what it can give you.

[A]

And also there's like crazy kind of diversity quotes and all that stuff too.

[B]

Yeah. Where it makes you think the military. Yeah. It's a social experiment and it's not about serving something higher than yourself. And you know, I think I did, you know, I borrowed that, that famous JFK phrase, what you can do for your country, not what your country can do for you. And you know, and I think like that was one reason among others, why got me to join in 2007 was, you know, it was just a few years after 9, 11. There was the sense of duty, of a higher calling, that kind of thing. And you know, as a 17 year old kid who'd only ever thought about myself up until that point, there was something appealing about. Yeah, like what? You know, this, this seems like this is an important thing. It's an important historical moment instead of, you know, oh well, it'll pay off your student debt or something like that. It's just you're going to attract a different type of person with one strategy versus the other.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not saying get rid of those benefits of course.

[B]

Oh, not at all.

[A]

But the marketing has to be. So how long did you spend?

[B]

Eight years.

[A]

Eight years. Okay. So I guess we actually started active duty almost around the same time. So I mean I technically joined 2002 because I did ROTC, but I was.

[B]

Commissioned in 2006, so I was an enlisted side.

[A]

And so then you. And then how'd you get to Yale because you got a pretty bad GPA there.

[B]

Yeah, it was. Yeah.

[A]

How did this happen?

[B]

I had to explain this when I interviewed the admissions officer because I had to send my high school transcripts and she's like, you got to explain this. This is not the typical transcript of a Yale applicant. But up until that. So I never took the SAT in high school. I'm a big defender. I talk about this in my books, in my essays of standardized testing. I think it was a huge mistake with a lot of the elite colleges did abandoning it because all the data show that it actually increases the number of kids from marginalized, low income, whatever backgrounds. And basically when they abandoned the SAT requirement, they actually got fewer applications from low income and non white applicants.

[A]

Interesting. I didn't know that.

[B]

And yeah, there are a bunch of different reasons for this, but essentially standardized testing actually does what it's supposed to do, which is identify promising kids in bad situations, merit based focus, and at.

[A]

Least gives you a chance.

[B]

Yes. And so I took the SAT later in my life. So I took the ASVAB in high school and I remember sitting with a recruiter in high school and he's going.

[A]

Over for people listening. The ASVAB is, is like the SAT for the military.

[B]

Exactly, yeah, it's standardized test. And he was showing me my test scores and he showed me some formula to convert the results into SAT scores. So the ASVAB results into SAT scores. And I saw that my score was actually pretty good. Had I taken the sat, which I didn't.

[A]

So you didn't take the SAT to get into Yale?

[B]

Later, I did.

[A]

Okay, later.

[B]

So I'm talking about the asvab. So then a few years later, fast forwarding, and I had about a year left on my enlistment. I had taken some night classes, classes at a community college, finally signed up to take the SAT and put together pretty good packaging, recommendation letters for my commanding officer, that kind of thing, and managed to get this interview. And to their credit, they let me in. And so I had the GI Bill, started classes. This was the fall of 2015. I'll sometimes tell this joke where while I was writing this book, I took this genetic ancestry test just to see if I could learn anything about my father's side of the family. Something worth noting writing about for the sake of the book. And I discovered that I'm half Hispanic on my father's side, so my dad was Mexican, which I went my whole life not knowing about. But I think I put it in the book somewhere that I wish I had known that when I was applying for college. Yeah, every little bit helps. But I managed to get in and, and this was 2015, which was. I mean, now most of your listeners, I'm sure, are aware that was kind of the beginning of a lot of the craziness that was happening in higher education. A lot of student protests, a lot of. I saw students marching around campus calling for professors to be fired, for these people to be, whatever, deplatformed, canceled and so forth. And I'm coming into this with no knowledge at all of like, what they're even talking about, about cisgender, heteronormative, like all this jargon in this language of interlocking systems of oppression. And I'm like, I just got out of the Air Force like six weeks ago, I set foot on campus and I see these eruptions take place. And now that I'm kind of plugged into higher education, I'm hearing about the following year. So 2016 worked with a friend of mine who was a former Marine, and he got into Brown and he calls me up, this was Veterans Day on 2016. And he's like, look, they're burning flags on campus right now. And for Veterans Day, they're burning American flags. And he was like, like, why are they doing this? And I said, your guess is as good as mine. Like we could not. Like we were trying to put these pieces together for.

[A]

We're all still trying to figure out the pathology of those years. Has it died down a little bit?

[B]

I think a little. Although October 7th kind of reignited a lot of it. But. And so I'm coming into this, like, trying to figure out what's going on here. And I'm having these conversations with, with students, professors, graduates of these places. And at the same time I'm reading a lot about kind of the history of social class in America. And that's where I came up with that phrase, luxury beliefs of these people who enact these self congratulatory ideas, these policies, they promote these ideas and they end up backfiring and hurting the very people they're meant to help. And it's all about sort of boosting your own reputation.

[A]

Virtue signaling.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

With actual victims. Victims involved, unfortunately.

[B]

Yeah. A lot of grandstanding.

[A]

What was your PhD in?

[B]

It was in social psychology. Okay. Yeah. And so. And one reason why I decided to go off to England to do a PhD was because I was fed up with what was happening in the US And I thought, okay, well, you know, and I had this image in my mind of Cambridge as like, you know, these like dons and these robes and there's just far removed. Yeah. Just. Just unconcerned with the Sort of, you know, campus politics. No, no, it was exactly the same. It's the same thing. It's the same thing.

[A]

I think it started later, but I think the common. In hindsight, those of us who look at this, you looked at it more than I have, but it seems to me that we kind of created it. But then it.

[B]

There was this weird circle to Europe where the, like.

[A]

Well, now it's still there. I mean, now they're arresting people for Facebook posts.

[B]

Actually, at the UK there, it's gotten worse. Well, I think there was this weird, like. I mean, I don't want to get, like, the whole intellectual genealogy, but I think, like, so Marxism is a European ideology, and so is postmodernism, and it was birthed in Europe, but then they exported it, and then we took it, and then, like, we added our own. It's like postmodernism with American characteristics, and then we gave it back to them. So, you know, maybe it's revenge. But then in 2019. So this is my first year at Cambridge. Jordan Peterson was supposed to be a guest research fellow at the University of Cambridge. And I was really excited for this because I was a huge fan of his. I'd read his book and, you know, his podcast, everything. You know, I was one of the Peterson fanboys. And then he gets disinvited, you know, for whatever ism or whatever it was at the. You know, what, those student petitions and all this stuff. A lot of anger on campus. How could George Peterson come here?

[A]

Yeah. And he says there's two genders.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

They actually didn't even say. He's like, I refuse to have to say there's two genders. Like, that was literally his point. I mean, that's what made him famous. Yeah, that's how ridiculous compelled speech. His point time was.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah, it was. Yeah, 2019 was. Yeah. And so I wrote an op ed defending Jordan from all of the charges against him, which, you know, some people on campus liked it more than others. But that basically got me in touch with Jordan and got me thinking about, okay, well, this isn't just affecting American higher education. This is affecting British higher education. It's affecting, you know, a lot of different places. And so I started writing publicly about it and speaking more about this disconnect between the way that I grew up, you know, in this place, far removed from the concerns of the ivory tower. And then I get there, and I'm seeing these people who are promoting all these bizarre ideas that have no connection with reality of what people are actually concerned about in their everyday lives and they think they're doing the right thing. They think they're helping people by, you know, defunding the police or promoting decriminalization.

[A]

Political phrases. That's how Trump won.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, no, no, that's exactly because.

[A]

It'S like normal people don't believe this. We got to wrap up because I got to go. But what's, what do we end with here? What's our, what's our conclusion?

[B]

What is the, what is the conclusion here? Well, I think for people who are fortunate enough to have gone to college and to live, you know, relatively comfortable lives, forget college, just if you've managed to be successful by whatever measure it happens to be, I think all of us have a duty to sort of interrogate our own beliefs and think about what could be the second order effects of whatever policy I support or belief that I hold. Is this actually helping the people that I want to help or is it not? Because I find that a lot of people who hold the luxury beliefs, it's not that they're malicious, they're just naive. They just want to be good people and they want to be looked upon favorably.

[A]

They want short term satisfaction at the expense of long term pain. I mean, we have countless examples. You've already named a few. Defund. The minimum wage is another one. So you want to cut off. We have to sell, and conservatives have to sell the truth about the ladder, the ladder of upward mobility. And liberals feel nice, it makes you feel nice to say, oh, of course you should get a, a minimum wage that's higher. Right. We want to give money to people. Want to give people free this and free that. And really you're just bribing them for their votes. But feels good, but that short term feel good for long term pain and malfunction and kind of trapping people in these cycles of poverty.

[B]

Yeah. And yeah, I think that we could do more. The solution, especially on the left, is always more redistribution and more economic transfer, cash transfer. I'm not even necessarily opposed to financial assistance for struggling families. But I think that in addition to sharing material wealth, we could also share the kind of knowledge that, that you accrue if you, if you become a relatively successful person and you've learned what habits and what actions.

[A]

That's what's so infuriating. It's like, hey, Mr. Liberal, who's espousing this idea? Did you do that?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No, you didn't. Yeah, like that's not how you lived. And there's a reason you're rich, you.

[B]

Know, because they work hard. Often what you'll find with successful people is publicly they'll say, oh, you know, I got lucky, and, you know, systemic forces and so forth. But then privately, they tell their own kids, you know, if you want to make it in this world, you got to work hard.

[A]

So one of the things I love doing is we'll end with this. It's like, as a. In politics or policy, we should treat the American people like we would treat kids like that we love.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Should treat them like we love them. And, you know, you're not the ant trying to spoil them and make you like them. Make them like you're trying to help them succeed, which means you have to treat them like you love them.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And that means guardrails. That means. That means consequences. That means merit based upward mobility. It means a lot of things that every parent inherently knows. And that's. That's. You can take it at the micro. Micro level, the family level, and. But you can also extrapolate that to the broader policy level, I think. Yeah. Treat people like you actually love them.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. Treat them like they were one of your loved ones. You know, you would never tell your love. Oh, you know, just take it easy. Don't do anything. Yeah.

[A]

It's not your fault you got bad grades. Teacher's fault.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. What does that do? Yeah.

[A]

Not good.

[B]

It's undermining.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you, Rob, for being on. We Can Talk Forever is really interesting. I think people got a lot out of that. So the book is troubled. It's been out for a while. It's a national bestseller. Thanks for coming on.

[B]

Thank you, Congressman.

[A]

All right.