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LUXURY BELIEFS: Has social class shaped your mind? · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:22
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:27
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod. Hello, listeners,
• 0:38
  Speaker 4: and welcome once again. Today we have with us a guest.
• 0:44
  Speaker 4: His name is Rob Henderson, and he is the bestselling
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: author of a book entitled Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family,
• 0:53
  Speaker 4: and social class. He grew up in foster homes in
• 0:58
  Speaker 4: Los Angeles and the rural town of Red Bluff, California.
• 1:02
  Speaker 4: He enlisted in the Air Force at the age of 17.
• 1:06
  Speaker 4: and subsequently attended Yale University or Yale College on the
• 1:11
  Speaker 4: GI Bill, and was then awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship
• 1:15
  Speaker 4: to study at the University of Cambridge in England, where
• 1:19
  Speaker 4: he obtained a PhD in psychology in 2022. His writing
• 1:24
  Speaker 4: has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
• 1:28
  Speaker 4: Boston Globe, amongst other outlets. And his newsletter is sent
• 1:33
  Speaker 4: each week to more than 50,000 subscribers. So with all that, welcome, Rob.
• 1:41
  Speaker 5: Thank you. Thank you, Deb. Thanks, Lisa and Joseph. It's
• 1:44
  Speaker 5: great to be here.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Well, I had your book on my virtual nightstand for
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: a long time, Rob. I'd been looking forward to its publication.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: And then I follow you on what used to be
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: called Twitter. And noticed that you were reading some Jung,
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: and I thought, well, this is going to be a
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: really interesting conversation. So I I thought we could kind
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: of talk about the intersection of your interests, your research interests,
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: and what you've been writing on in the past several years,
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: as well as your personal experience and Jungian psychology and
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: see what veins there are to mine there.
• 2:23
  Speaker 5: Yeah, sure.
• 2:23
  Speaker 6: I mean, I've been sort of dipping in and out
• 2:27
  Speaker 6: of Jung for maybe the last year, year and a half.
• 2:31
  Speaker 6: And yeah, I find it fascinating. It's such a different
• 2:33
  Speaker 6: way of understanding the human mind, than what I'm used
• 2:37
  Speaker 6: to coming out of kind of this academic psychology. I
• 2:42
  Speaker 6: was a research assistant as an undergrad, and psychology has
• 2:46
  Speaker 6: really attempted to fashion itself into a science, I think,
• 2:50
  Speaker 6: with maybe a limited success. And so for that reason,
• 2:57
  Speaker 6: among others, I've become more curious about sort of going
• 3:00
  Speaker 6: back to the roots of where psychology started back to
• 3:04
  Speaker 6: the psychoanalysts, back to Freud, back to Jung, and seeing
• 3:08
  Speaker 6: what I can glean from these thinkers.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: And would you mind just telling us a little bit
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: about what you have been, what your research focus is,
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: or what your work has been focused on?
• 3:23
  Speaker 6: I did a PhD at the University of Cambridge, studied
• 3:29
  Speaker 6: kind of social personality psychology, My PhD thesis was building
• 3:34
  Speaker 6: on some of the work from Jonathan Haidt in moral psychology,
• 3:38
  Speaker 6: moral foundations theory. That period in the midst of my PhD,
• 3:43
  Speaker 6: the pandemic was ongoing. And so I became interested in
• 3:48
  Speaker 6: kind of the relationship between COVID and disgust and morality
• 3:53
  Speaker 6: and those kinds of things. And so I was working
• 3:56
  Speaker 6: on my PhD during that time and ran some online
• 3:58
  Speaker 6: studies And, you know, I did the whole sort of analysis,
• 4:01
  Speaker 6: wrote up the results. I got a couple of peer-reviewed
• 4:04
  Speaker 6: papers published during that time. And, you know, I read
• 4:06
  Speaker 6: a lot about personality, kind of personality psychology as it's
• 4:10
  Speaker 6: taught in many departments now, the big five, the Hexaco model.
• 4:14
  Speaker 6: And then later, you know, learned about the Myers-Briggs and
• 4:18
  Speaker 6: some of those other approaches. And, you know, throughout this time,
• 4:23
  Speaker 6: I was reading a lot about social class, social status,
• 4:28
  Speaker 6: this people tend to have for being held in high
• 4:34
  Speaker 6: regard by other people and where that stems from and
• 4:38
  Speaker 6: how this feeling, this desire seems to be more pronounced
• 4:43
  Speaker 6: in some people than others. There were two papers that
• 4:45
  Speaker 6: were published when I was still a student. These were
• 4:48
  Speaker 6: both published, I believe, in 2020. And both of these
• 4:51
  Speaker 6: papers found that essentially the higher status, the higher social
• 4:57
  Speaker 6: class people are, the stronger their desire for wealth and status.
• 5:01
  Speaker 6: And so these researchers collected objective measures of one's position
• 5:06
  Speaker 6: in society. So wealth, income, occupational prestige, level of education,
• 5:12
  Speaker 6: and then asked participants questions, the extent to which they
• 5:17
  Speaker 6: agreed with statements like, it would please me to be
• 5:21
  Speaker 6: in a position of power over others. I enjoy when
• 5:23
  Speaker 6: people look up when I enter a room and so on. Essentially,
• 5:28
  Speaker 6: the higher people scored on those objective measures, the more
• 5:32
  Speaker 6: likely they were to agree with those statements about being
• 5:37
  Speaker 6: interested in power and recognition and so on. That helped
• 5:41
  Speaker 6: me to put some of the puzzle pieces together as
• 5:44
  Speaker 6: far as what I was seeing, particularly at elite university campuses,
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  Speaker 6: places like Cambridge, places like Yale, where I had come
• 5:52
  Speaker 6: from a completely different environment before setting foot on campus.
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  Speaker 6: And so, of course, I was interested in psychology and
• 5:58
  Speaker 6: social class and status from an intellectual standpoint, but also
• 6:03
  Speaker 6: from kind of a personal one as well, given my
• 6:05
  Speaker 6: experiences kind of traveling along the class ladder.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: So, Rob, this may be a good time to just
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: offer to our readers a little bit of your story
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: that you captured in your book, Troubled. Some of the
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: listeners may not have necessarily read your book, and that
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: might contextualize some of your comments. So I know this
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: is rather difficult to create a synopsis of such a
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: large arc. But can you tell us a little bit
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: about the book?
• 6:35
  Speaker 6: Well, so the book Trouble, it came out in February. And,
• 6:39
  Speaker 6: you know, it was kind of six years in the making,
• 6:44
  Speaker 6: this process of getting this book written and then published.
• 6:47
  Speaker 6: And I struggled a lot with it. But, you know,
• 6:50
  Speaker 6: so we've discussed a little bit. You know, I have
• 6:52
  Speaker 6: this degree from Cambridge University. studied at Yale, but before these,
• 6:56
  Speaker 6: you know, before entering these elite universities, my life was
• 6:59
  Speaker 6: a lot different. Um, so to just back way up,
• 7:04
  Speaker 6: I was born in Los Angeles, uh, into poverty, never
• 7:08
  Speaker 6: knew my father, my, uh, mother, and we were homeless
• 7:13
  Speaker 6: for a time. Shortly after I was born, we lived
• 7:15
  Speaker 6: in a car. Eventually we, um, settled in this slum
• 7:20
  Speaker 6: apartment in LA. And my mom became heavily addicted to drugs.
• 7:27
  Speaker 6: And when I was three years old, I was taken
• 7:29
  Speaker 6: from her care and placed into the Los Angeles County
• 7:33
  Speaker 6: foster care system where I lived in seven different homes
• 7:37
  Speaker 6: and was eventually adopted. And, you know, during this time,
• 7:41
  Speaker 6: some forensic psychologists actually interviewed my birth mother and asked her,
• 7:48
  Speaker 6: where's this boy's father? Because you're clearly not in a
• 7:51
  Speaker 6: position to care for him. And she said she didn't
• 7:53
  Speaker 6: know where my father was. And so my mother, she
• 7:58
  Speaker 6: was from Seoul, from South Korea. And that was not
• 8:01
  Speaker 6: her first run in with law enforcement. And so she
• 8:05
  Speaker 6: was deported back to Korea. And I was born in
• 8:09
  Speaker 6: the US, I was an American citizen. And so I
• 8:12
  Speaker 6: got stuck in the foster care system. And yeah, I
• 8:15
  Speaker 6: never did learn about my I actually took a 23andMe,
• 8:18
  Speaker 6: one of these genetic ancestry tests, and discovered that I'm
• 8:22
  Speaker 6: half Mexican on my father's side.
• 8:24
  Speaker 5: So my father was Hispanic. My mother was Korean.
• 8:26
  Speaker 6: You know, the joke that I've sometimes told is, you know,
• 8:30
  Speaker 6: I wish I'd known about that side of my family
• 8:32
  Speaker 6: when I was applying to college.
• 8:34
  Speaker 5: That might have been helpful. It ended up working out anyway.
• 8:40
  Speaker 6: And so eventually I was adopted by by this working
• 8:44
  Speaker 6: class family in Northern California.
• 8:47
  Speaker 5: This was the late 90s. So I was eight or
• 8:51
  Speaker 5: nine years old when.
• 8:54
  Speaker 6: My adoptive family, we settled in a town called Red Bluff,
• 8:58
  Speaker 6: working class town. And it was an intact sort of
• 9:05
  Speaker 6: stable family for a time. And then they subsequently divorced
• 9:09
  Speaker 6: about 18 months after the adoption. And I lost contact
• 9:15
  Speaker 6: with my adoptive father. And, you know, I delve into
• 9:18
  Speaker 6: the details in the book of just how much drama
• 9:20
  Speaker 6: there was and family tragedies and financial catastrophes. And this
• 9:25
  Speaker 6: was not at all uncommon. You know, later, once I
• 9:28
  Speaker 6: became old enough and read about the research and the
• 9:30
  Speaker 6: sociological data on kind of blue collar working.
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  Speaker 5: Class towns across the.
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  Speaker 6: Country, you know, family fragmentation is a widespread phenomenon. And
• 9:41
  Speaker 6: I described some of the lives of my friends in
• 9:43
  Speaker 6: my book as well and how they came from similar
• 9:46
  Speaker 6: backgrounds as myself and how their lives ended up. And
• 9:50
  Speaker 6: it really was kind of a half impulsive decision. I
• 9:54
  Speaker 6: got out of there, enlisted as soon as I could
• 9:56
  Speaker 6: when I was 17 and left for Vietnam. Air Force,
• 10:01
  Speaker 6: where I was enlisted for eight years. And, you know,
• 10:04
  Speaker 6: I learned a lot while I was there. I was
• 10:08
  Speaker 6: in the military, although there were some setbacks and some
• 10:12
  Speaker 6: struggles there as well. And then eventually got my way
• 10:15
  Speaker 6: into Yale on the GI Bill, And so, yeah, I've
• 10:21
  Speaker 6: had a lot of unusual experiences for someone with the
• 10:25
  Speaker 6: education that I have. And so I spent quite a
• 10:28
  Speaker 6: bit of time sharing my observations and reflections on social
• 10:34
  Speaker 6: mobility in the book.
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: So given the breadth of your experience and also the
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: suffering that you had overcome, why do you think that
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: you had focused on this idea of status, opportunity, luxury beliefs.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: For instance, you could easily have decided that research into
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: trauma or childhood trauma equally would have been your purview
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: having experienced that. But what funneled your interest particularly into
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: this kind of socioeconomic and privilege dynamic?
• 11:10
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I think one possibility is that I did sort
• 11:16
  Speaker 6: of have that, that experience of being born, you know, about,
• 11:21
  Speaker 6: about as poor as.
• 11:21
  Speaker 5: You could be in a developed kind of first world country.
• 11:25
  Speaker 6: Um, so I started, uh, about as low as you
• 11:28
  Speaker 6: can start in terms of socioeconomic status. And then by
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  Speaker 6: the time I was adopted, you know, I I'd witnessed
• 11:36
  Speaker 6: the kind of working class, lower middle-class environment. Then by
• 11:40
  Speaker 6: the time I got to the military and I had
• 11:42
  Speaker 6: kind of more middle class friends, and then I get
• 11:44
  Speaker 6: to Yale and had friends who were more sort of
• 11:46
  Speaker 6: upper middle or upper class. And so I really saw,
• 11:49
  Speaker 6: you know, kind of the broadest spectrum of socioeconomic status
• 11:55
  Speaker 6: that you could see in the U.S. And yeah, all
• 11:58
  Speaker 6: along the way, I attempted to put these pieces together,
• 12:02
  Speaker 6: these differences I was seeing, not just in terms of money,
• 12:05
  Speaker 6: but also in terms of family structure, in terms of
• 12:08
  Speaker 6: cultural capital, social capital, who gets access to what and
• 12:12
  Speaker 6: who doesn't. And then in my own experience, I'm sure
• 12:16
  Speaker 6: you mentioned childhood trauma. There's probably a piece there where
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  Speaker 6: I myself was seeking regard from other people because I
• 12:22
  Speaker 6: had so little of it in the foster homes and
• 12:25
  Speaker 6: from my birth mother. I mentioned in the book, I
• 12:28
  Speaker 6: have two memories of her. The body remembers, right? So
• 12:32
  Speaker 6: even if I don't necessarily consciously have the experience of
• 12:34
  Speaker 6: remembrance of my mother and our interactions, my guess was
• 12:40
  Speaker 6: she was not exactly 100% present. And then in all
• 12:44
  Speaker 6: of the foster homes, there were sort of varying degrees
• 12:46
  Speaker 6: of neglect. And then in my adoptive family, there was
• 12:52
  Speaker 6: less than adequate supervision at home as well. And so later,
• 12:55
  Speaker 6: when I joined the military and achieved a bit of
• 13:01
  Speaker 6: success for myself and realized how I felt differently about myself,
• 13:05
  Speaker 6: how other people looked at me.
• 13:07
  Speaker 5: And I wanted to understand that too.
• 13:10
  Speaker 6: What was that that led me to experience that transformation
• 13:14
  Speaker 6: and why that seems to be such a fundamental drive
• 13:16
  Speaker 6: for people?
• 13:20
  Speaker 4: It seems to me that in a way, what Joseph
• 13:24
  Speaker 4: has articulated might be likened to two sides of a coin,
• 13:30
  Speaker 4: heads and tails, that trauma and social class are very
• 13:33
  Speaker 4: much intertwined. And that poverty and lots of changes of caregivers,
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: inadequate educational experiences, perhaps you could put anything you want
• 13:47
  Speaker 4: into that category, are in effect aspects of childhood trauma.
• 13:54
  Speaker 4: They're not the only ones, but... You know, if you
• 13:58
  Speaker 4: are living in a car or have had multiple caregivers
• 14:02
  Speaker 4: in the foster through the foster, quote, care, unquote, system,
• 14:07
  Speaker 4: there's a relationship there.
• 14:08
  Speaker 6: The other piece was that shortly before my first deployment
• 14:13
  Speaker 6: on a whim, this was sort of my my first
• 14:16
  Speaker 6: step towards studying psychology. I picked up this book from
• 14:20
  Speaker 6: the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. This was this is twenty twelve. Um,
• 14:25
  Speaker 6: and you know, the title got my attention. It was
• 14:27
  Speaker 6: just called how the mind works. Very simple title. And,
• 14:30
  Speaker 6: you know, I was 20, I think it was 22
• 14:32
  Speaker 6: at that time. I thought, Oh, how does the mind work?
• 14:34
  Speaker 6: You know, I was about to go on a long
• 14:35
  Speaker 6: flight and spend six months in another country and figured
• 14:39
  Speaker 6: out here's a thick, dense book that might occupy my,
• 14:43
  Speaker 6: my time. And there was a passage in there, uh,
• 14:46
  Speaker 6: that I mentioned in troubled about how Pinker points out that, yeah,
• 14:50
  Speaker 6: this is a fundamental drive and he gives all of
• 14:52
  Speaker 6: the kind of synonyms, uh, status, you know, esteem, recognition, prestige, regard,
• 14:58
  Speaker 6: so on and so forth. And, you know, this is
• 15:02
  Speaker 6: something that people long for and pursue. And, you know,
• 15:09
  Speaker 6: because Pinker claimed it was universal. And I think, you know,
• 15:11
  Speaker 6: is it universal? In my case, it seems to be true.
• 15:13
  Speaker 6: And yeah, once I started to learn about how you
• 15:17
  Speaker 6: could actually study these things empirically, you know, led me
• 15:21
  Speaker 6: down the path of, you know, studying it in a
• 15:23
  Speaker 6: more formal way in college and then later in grad school.
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: It's interesting because we've had this national discourse on diversity,
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: and most of that has been focused on race and
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: maybe a few other parameters. But I feel like class
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: has often dropped out of the discussion. So it's refreshing
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: to kind of read about it. And as I've been
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: reading some about class in your book and in some
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: other books too, I've felt very called out about I
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: was sharing before we started recording, Rob, that you have
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: this line in your book about, which you're quoting from
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: another author about how educated people like to name their pets,
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: you know, things like Clytemnestra. And I was like, oh, man,
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: that hits really close to home. But I guess my
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: point is that in reading these books, your book and others,
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: it's like it's bringing to consciousness something that that I've done,
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: that I've aligned with, that's been very egocentronic, that's been,
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: you know, I haven't, it feels comfortable to me, for example,
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: to want to name my pets after some, you know,
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: literary illusion. And without recognizing that what I'm doing is
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: signaling prestige or class. But of course, once it's pointed
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: out to me, it's like, well, maybe your, you know,
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: predilection for organic foods isn't just about about, you know,
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: wanting to eat healthy. Maybe, maybe it's also a signifier of,
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: of class or prestige. And I mean, then there's a
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: thousand other things, right? What I, what I read, what I,
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: what I, what I value. And I, I can see how,
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: you know, it's in some sense, it's just been the
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: brine I've been pickled in that I don't question, that
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: I don't think about it, that I don't relate. And,
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: and of course, I think that this is what some
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: people mean when they talk about privilege. you know, sort
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: of white privilege, that there's just things I take for granted.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: That concept has some, has a lot of validity. And,
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: and I, and I think that in making it just
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: about race, we're obscuring something about class too. So I'm
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: reaching for something. I don't know that I'm landing.
• 17:40
  Speaker 5: I think you're right. I just had this conversation recently
• 17:42
  Speaker 5: with a friend of mine.
• 17:43
  Speaker 6: He's a professor and he's on some diversity organization at
• 17:48
  Speaker 6: his university. And, He told me the other day that
• 17:52
  Speaker 6: everyone was discussing these different categories of diversity and he
• 17:55
  Speaker 6: brought up class and people politely nodded and then moved
• 18:02
  Speaker 6: right back to talking about these other categories and really
• 18:04
  Speaker 6: expressed no interest in pursuing more class diversity, which I
• 18:09
  Speaker 6: find fascinating. I was shocked when I arrived at Yale
• 18:15
  Speaker 6: of just how little interest there was in class and how,
• 18:20
  Speaker 6: you know, this is probably, I mean, you know, of course,
• 18:24
  Speaker 6: there are various forms of marginalization and victimization and so on.
• 18:29
  Speaker 6: But I think for most people, if you, you know,
• 18:31
  Speaker 6: you had to be, if you had the choice, I
• 18:34
  Speaker 6: think very few people would choose the one where you
• 18:36
  Speaker 6: didn't actually have enough material resources. That seems to be,
• 18:40
  Speaker 6: you know, particularly difficult to talk about. And, you know,
• 18:45
  Speaker 6: I just had this conversation with a friend of mine,
• 18:48
  Speaker 6: he's a professor, and he also researches class and he
• 18:52
  Speaker 6: somehow he managed to collect these data from a business
• 18:54
  Speaker 6: school and he recorded these kinds of conversations among the
• 18:59
  Speaker 6: students and their interactions and basically found that, you know,
• 19:05
  Speaker 6: despite the fact that there are various forms of marginalized identities,
• 19:09
  Speaker 6: the students were relatively open in terms of describing their
• 19:13
  Speaker 6: identities in terms of ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation
• 19:18
  Speaker 6: and so on. But he said the one that the
• 19:20
  Speaker 6: students very much avoided divulging was class. You know, the
• 19:25
  Speaker 6: wealthy students didn't want to talk about their wealth. The
• 19:27
  Speaker 6: poor students didn't want to talk about their impoverished backgrounds.
• 19:31
  Speaker 6: No one wants to talk about money, which I find fascinating.
• 19:34
  Speaker 6: I think maybe it does kind of stem from this.
• 19:37
  Speaker 6: Maybe it just stems from this American belief that class
• 19:39
  Speaker 6: doesn't exist and that we're all kind of we're all
• 19:42
  Speaker 6: middle class, you know.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: You know, it's funny to just to go back to
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: Canada Goose Jackets. I have a friend whose daughter was
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: actually at Yale and my friend had actually been given
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: in some promotion or something because that's having to do
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: with her job. She actually had a Canada goose jacket
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: and her daughter needed a jacket. So my friend was like,
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: you know, take this jacket. I was like, mom, I
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: cannot wear that, you know, because it, because it signified
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: this sort of degree of elitism. Exactly. And so she.
• 20:12
  Speaker 5: Wouldn't wear it.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: It's just so funny. So, and it's like, do you
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: want to, do you want to signal that you have money?
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: Because that's what most people have wanted to do throughout history.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: You know, I, I actually, I actually love reading kind
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: of old novels, you know, from this, like the 17th
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: and 18th century. And a lot of those novels are
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: all about like, who's got money and how do you know,
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: and how nice a house does Mr. Darcy have and,
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: and all of this stuff, right? There's a lot of that.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: So it's, you know, it's kind of, it's always been
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: with us, you know? But nowadays it's almost fashionable not
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: to signal that you have material advantage. So it's, it's interesting.
• 20:51
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that is, that is interesting.
• 20:53
  Speaker 6: And, I spent some time in the book dwelling on
• 20:58
  Speaker 6: this point that class is not just about money. It
• 21:01
  Speaker 6: is about these more subtle signifiers of your interests, your tastes,
• 21:07
  Speaker 6: your hobbies, where you went to school, which university you
• 21:12
  Speaker 6: graduated from, and what disciplines or majors you studied. Paul
• 21:18
  Speaker 6: Fussell writes about this in his great book, Class, A
• 21:20
  Speaker 6: Guide Through the American Status System, that You know, kind
• 21:23
  Speaker 6: of the more useless the subject, the higher the class background.
• 21:29
  Speaker 6: And I noticed this, that, you know, when I was
• 21:31
  Speaker 6: in college, the students who were, for example, a disproportionate
• 21:35
  Speaker 6: number of the ones who were headed off to medical
• 21:37
  Speaker 6: school were from immigrant backgrounds. You know, they knew that
• 21:40
  Speaker 6: they were going to have a job as a physician,
• 21:42
  Speaker 6: whereas the students who were legacies or who were sort
• 21:46
  Speaker 6: of comfortably upper, upper middle class, you know, they were
• 21:49
  Speaker 6: interested in studying topics that didn't necessarily have a job
• 21:52
  Speaker 6: waiting for them or a confirmed job at the end,
• 21:55
  Speaker 6: something a bit more abstract. And so, you know, I
• 21:59
  Speaker 6: found that interesting. And when I was in Switzerland recently,
• 22:03
  Speaker 6: I visited Jung's house in Kuznach, but I decided to
• 22:07
  Speaker 6: pick up a book that was less serious, say, than
• 22:11
  Speaker 6: something like How the Mind Works or Paul Fussell. I
• 22:13
  Speaker 6: read this book, China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan. So
• 22:19
  Speaker 6: this is the sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, which some
• 22:22
  Speaker 6: of your listeners may be familiar with. It was a
• 22:24
  Speaker 6: big movie that came out five or six years ago.
• 22:26
  Speaker 6: So this is the sequel to that.
• 22:28
  Speaker 5: It's the novel.
• 22:29
  Speaker 6: And one of the points in the book, you know,
• 22:31
  Speaker 6: one of the characters is talking about how he always
• 22:33
  Speaker 6: felt poor growing up, despite the fact that his family
• 22:36
  Speaker 6: was obscenely wealthy. And the reason he said is because
• 22:40
  Speaker 6: they drove an old car and their dishware had chips,
• 22:44
  Speaker 6: you and so on, and their furniture was old. And
• 22:52
  Speaker 6: later someone had to explain to him, no, like that's
• 22:54
  Speaker 6: how legacy wealth works. You have antique furniture, you have
• 22:59
  Speaker 6: old dishware, you drive a beat up car, like this
• 23:02
  Speaker 6: is just how you.
• 23:03
  Speaker 5: Perform your class. And it's similar actually.
• 23:06
  Speaker 6: So this was in Singapore where the story takes place,
• 23:09
  Speaker 6: but it's the same in America too, where kind of
• 23:11
  Speaker 6: these old blue blooded wasps, they all drive a BMW
• 23:14
  Speaker 6: from 1988 and have kind of frayed collars on their suits.
• 23:18
  Speaker 6: And that's how you can kind of tell that this
• 23:19
  Speaker 6: is not new money. New money drives a Lexus and
• 23:22
  Speaker 6: has the flashy Brooks Brothers and wears a Rolex.
• 23:27
  Speaker 5: The old money, they don't signal their class in that way.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: That's fascinating. I mean, this has always been with us, right?
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: And I think it's true that we don't talk about it.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: And one of the things that's been floating around the
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: edges of our conversation, I feel like for the past
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: few minutes that I'll just go ahead and land is,
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: between Jungian psychology and class. Jung grew up, I would say,
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: kind of maybe middle class. His father was a pastor
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: kind of in a rural place, but he married the
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: second richest woman in Switzerland and didn't have to worry
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: about money after that. And the group that grew around
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: him were very, especially as he became more renowned, were
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: very moneyed. foreigners, many of them, including the melons. It's very,
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: very expensive to train to become an analyst. It being
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: in analysis is, is generally very expensive. And talk about
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: the point you made earlier about, you know, sort of
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: fringe interests, you know, I mean, boy, You know, alchemy, anyone?
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, so that's something I think I'm aware of
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: that operates in my little corner of the world and
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: I'm kind of curious about.
• 24:49
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I think that's right, that it's expensive to become
• 24:53
  Speaker 6: an analyst and it's expensive to receive the analysis as well.
• 24:57
  Speaker 6: I had dinner the other day with a friend who
• 24:59
  Speaker 6: was explaining to me that he, so he's older, he's
• 25:02
  Speaker 6: an older person. gentleman, ultra high net worth. And he
• 25:05
  Speaker 6: was telling he, you know, it's interesting, we're having this
• 25:07
  Speaker 6: conversation now, because he told me he credits his financial
• 25:11
  Speaker 6: success to psychoanalysis. So he's been and he goes, so
• 25:16
  Speaker 6: he lives in New York, and he goes through like
• 25:17
  Speaker 6: the old school, like Freudian, because I asked him, like, like,
• 25:21
  Speaker 6: are you talking about like, on the couch, like the
• 25:23
  Speaker 6: whole like, and he said, Yes, that's, you know, he's
• 25:25
  Speaker 6: been doing it for what, 1520 years now. And he
• 25:29
  Speaker 6: says like that allowed him to, you know, access parts
• 25:32
  Speaker 6: of himself he was unaware of and made him a
• 25:34
  Speaker 6: better businessman and so on and so forth. And and I,
• 25:39
  Speaker 6: you know, as he's explaining this to me, you know,
• 25:41
  Speaker 6: I did I did think that, you know, because he
• 25:43
  Speaker 6: came from a pretty well off family to begin with
• 25:45
  Speaker 6: and sort of took what he had and made even more.
• 25:48
  Speaker 6: If it's the case that there's a causal link between
• 25:50
  Speaker 6: the sort of psychoanalysis and and then earning lots of money.
• 25:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 25:56
  Speaker 6: You know, very few people would have the option to
• 26:00
  Speaker 6: do the analysis in order to make the money in
• 26:02
  Speaker 6: the first place, right? So there are these barriers in place.
• 26:06
  Speaker 6: And it's the case for all forms of education, really,
• 26:11
  Speaker 6: just how difficult it is to acquire and, yeah, these
• 26:16
  Speaker 6: invisible obstacles.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: So as you have spent time through your personal experience
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: and then also your education, bringing forward the significance of
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: status and class. And I'd like you to talk at
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: some point about luxury beliefs specifically, which is a wonderful
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: term that you had created to describe a phenomenon. Is
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: this something that we must simply become aware of and accept?
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: Or do you have a sense of that anything could
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: be done or even should be done around this, secondary
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: to being more aware of it?
• 26:53
  Speaker 6: Yeah, there was a great book on this topic a
• 26:56
  Speaker 6: couple of years ago by Will Storr, The Status Game.
• 27:00
  Speaker 6: And he talks about three types of games that we
• 27:04
  Speaker 6: play for status. He talks about dominance games. And this
• 27:09
  Speaker 6: is the most sort of archaic form of status competition.
• 27:13
  Speaker 6: And he cites, you know, animal research and, you know,
• 27:17
  Speaker 6: basically it's expressions of violence, of bullying and coercion and
• 27:22
  Speaker 6: so on. And he says, you know, in the modern
• 27:25
  Speaker 6: world and polite society, we don't necessarily have as much
• 27:28
  Speaker 6: of this, but you can see it in sports, or
• 27:30
  Speaker 6: you can see it in street gangs or mafias or
• 27:33
  Speaker 6: militaries and this kind of thing. And then he talks
• 27:36
  Speaker 6: about virtue games, attempting to outdo others in terms of
• 27:40
  Speaker 6: moral character. Some people might use this term kind of
• 27:43
  Speaker 6: virtue signaling, how, you know, one is more holier than thou.
• 27:48
  Speaker 6: And he talks about success games of, you know, basically
• 27:51
  Speaker 6: doing very well in your education and your career, obtaining
• 27:54
  Speaker 6: awards and accolades and so on. And, you know, he
• 27:57
  Speaker 6: says to varying degrees, you know, we're probably going to
• 28:01
  Speaker 6: play at least one of these games in one form
• 28:03
  Speaker 6: or another. And, you know, I think we can be
• 28:07
  Speaker 6: aware that we have this desire, but we can also
• 28:09
  Speaker 6: be aware of which game we want to play as well.
• 28:12
  Speaker 6: You know, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with
• 28:14
  Speaker 6: the kind of virtue games of attempting to become a
• 28:17
  Speaker 6: better version of yourself and attempt to improve the world.
• 28:21
  Speaker 6: But I think on the luxury beliefs point, which maybe
• 28:25
  Speaker 6: we could get into later of how just because your
• 28:28
  Speaker 6: intentions are good doesn't mean the outcomes are going to
• 28:30
  Speaker 6: be good. It's very easy to mistake affect and the
• 28:36
  Speaker 6: warm glow you feel from expressing an opinion or attempting
• 28:39
  Speaker 6: to implement a policy for how efficient and how effective and.
• 28:45
  Speaker 5: Know, those, those policies will be. So I think that's,
• 28:48
  Speaker 5: that's worth knowing, uh, as well.
• 28:50
  Speaker 6: And, you know, I've likened this desire for status to
• 28:52
  Speaker 6: something like hunger, where all of us to varying degrees
• 28:58
  Speaker 6: experience hunger, the intensity kind of varies from person to
• 29:01
  Speaker 6: person and how much we desire it varies food.
• 29:04
  Speaker 5: I mean, and it's the same with status.
• 29:06
  Speaker 6: I think, you know, I think it does kind of
• 29:08
  Speaker 6: follow along that normal distribution where the intensity of that
• 29:12
  Speaker 6: desire is uh, is different from person to person. You know,
• 29:17
  Speaker 6: I think for someone like me, you know, I'm interested
• 29:19
  Speaker 6: in studying it. And, and, uh, uh, my, my guess
• 29:23
  Speaker 6: is people who are interested in studying something like this
• 29:24
  Speaker 6: probably have a higher.
• 29:25
  Speaker 5: Than average desire for it.
• 29:28
  Speaker 6: And, and others don't, you know, I noticed this with, um,
• 29:31
  Speaker 6: and my friends that I grew up around, um, from
• 29:33
  Speaker 6: back home, of course, like they, they experienced their own
• 29:36
  Speaker 6: versions of status games and so on, but it's not
• 29:39
  Speaker 6: nearly to the same extent as I see among more
• 29:43
  Speaker 6: educated people. Although it's more subtle, it's pervasive.
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: So it seems like this is something we can become
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: aware of. What that awareness will do remains to be seen.
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: Will that deconstruct the potency of it? Because As Jungians
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: and psychoanalysts, that's one of the things we assume. That
• 30:04
  Speaker 3: when something is unconscious, it exerts a disproportionate amount of
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: influence and we justify it or we barely recognize it.
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: By becoming more aware of it, then we can become
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: more choiceful around it, perhaps. Or at least it becomes
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: an object to consider rather than kind of a subterranean
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: engine that's pushing us right and left. So in one way,
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: being aware of anything makes us have a little bit
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: more room, breathing room around it.
• 30:33
  Speaker 6: I've noticed this with people who become more aware of
• 30:37
  Speaker 6: this desire for status that, you know, especially overachievers who
• 30:42
  Speaker 6: are prone to burnout, that they say yes to everything
• 30:46
  Speaker 6: and they want to get every award, they want to
• 30:48
  Speaker 6: get every piece of recognition they possibly can. And then
• 30:52
  Speaker 6: once they recognize, oh, this stems from this desire that
• 30:55
  Speaker 6: I was unaware of, that, you know, they can They
• 30:57
  Speaker 6: can still feel it, but they're more willing to ignore it.
• 31:00
  Speaker 6: So I think maybe in terms of the feeling, I
• 31:02
  Speaker 6: don't know how much control we have, but in terms
• 31:04
  Speaker 6: of the actions.
• 31:05
  Speaker 5: We take, maybe we do have a bit more agency over.
• 31:06
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that when we become what I think
• 31:11
  Speaker 4: Joseph is pointing to is when we become aware of
• 31:16
  Speaker 4: something and it's in consciousness, then we can choose. So, OK,
• 31:21
  Speaker 4: I was really driven by this desire to get the
• 31:25
  Speaker 4: Chamber of Commerce award. or to buy a different kind
• 31:28
  Speaker 4: of car. Once I'm really aware of where that is
• 31:32
  Speaker 4: in me, then I can say, oh, wait a minute.
• 31:36
  Speaker 4: As Joseph said, it becomes an object. It's out there.
• 31:39
  Speaker 4: I can walk around it a little bit, look at it,
• 31:43
  Speaker 4: and then say, oh, I don't know. Maybe I don't
• 31:47
  Speaker 4: really need that. Maybe it can affect our choices. And altogether,
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: one hopes it is basically freeing us into more awareness,
• 32:00
  Speaker 4: more wholeness. And whether that leads to a lot more money,
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: like the person you were talking to in New York,
• 32:07
  Speaker 4: or whether that leads to, you know, I think I'll
• 32:11
  Speaker 4: go out and, you know, sort of one of the
• 32:15
  Speaker 4: vegetables in the garden. We have choices. I can choose.
• 32:21
  Speaker 4: I'm not grasped, uh, gripped by, by something, uh, like
• 32:26
  Speaker 4: that underground engine Joseph was talking about that just runs things.
• 32:31
  Speaker 4: At least that's the hope. Yeah.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: Joseph, I think you've raised something really interesting and we
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: obviously have a lot to say about it. I wanted
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: to link it to the idea of kind of persona
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: and shadow because, uh, and I, I appreciate Rob, you're
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: framing about these different kinds of games. So if we're playing, um, you,
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: you said there was, uh, there was a virtue game
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: and an achievement game. Let's say we're, let's say we're
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: playing the achievement game. So what we've identified with what's, um,
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: to use that psychobabble term, uh, kind of ego syntonic,
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: which it feels right to us. That would be what,
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: what is in the persona, how we want to, how
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: we want others to perceive us. So I'm very diligent.
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: I work really hard. I win the awards. I'm smart.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: I'm competent. I'm focused, whatever. But, There's also always something
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: that's going to be in the shadow that we're going
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: to disavow that's going to be the kind of opposite
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: of that. So that might be, well, I'm grasping and
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: I'm petty and I'm cutthroat or whatever might be the
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: sort of shadow side. So if you think about it,
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: maybe the virtue stuff, well, I care about the environment
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: and I care about diversity and I care about other
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: people but what's in the shadow is you know maybe
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: you know it's really important that people see me like
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: this and I'm going to vie for being the the
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: most virtuous and even if that means I'm going to
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: have to cut some other people down or so so
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: I think it's you know I really appreciate the question
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: you asked Joseph is like so what can we do
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: about this and I think if we if we translate
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: into Jungian terms one of the things that we can
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: do is say all right so So virtue is important
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: to me or achievements important to me or power is
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: important to me.
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: That's okay. And what's going to be left in the
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: shadow that I might then act out unconsciously or project
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: onto other people.
• 34:24
  Speaker 3: So I think we're talking about the various ways that
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: these insights might be applied in terms of our personal self-reflection,
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: how we might try to create some sense of balance and, and,
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: put something into our hands in terms of consideration. I
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: think as Jungians, one of the things that we're also
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: very interested in is that differentiation between the authentic self
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: and then the values that we are colonized by. And
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: in an ideal analysis, that begins to become really apparent.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: So I don't know that Infants are born with a
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: natural sense of status per se, but there is a
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: certain kind of competitive desire to thrive. And if we're
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: in an environment where thriving or the ones who are
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: thriving have certain statuses, there is something deeply instinctive that says, well,
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: I'm going to thrive if I identify with this group
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: versus the group that doesn't seem to be thriving. If
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: that was demonstrated with something other than status, We would
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: then be attenuated to those things, people with a certain
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: hair color or a certain physical build, all of which,
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: depending on the environment you live in, is something that's
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: noticed for sure. But often we are looking for any
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: evidence of what the structure of the personality is underneath that.
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: So I'm wondering that in your own process, because your
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: book is autobiographical, And so something inside of you prompted
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: you to examine how you became the man that you
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: have become. And often when we do that, it's because
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: we sense there is a secret in the narrative that
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: we haven't quite put together, we haven't quite found. And
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: often that secret is something that is more authentic, more
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: true than the trauma we've been subject to, more authentic
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: than what we've been colonized by. And in order to
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: make that separation between who am I really versus what's
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: been done to me, who am I really versus what's
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: colonized me, then it still leaves that important question Who
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: am I when I separate out these other things? So
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: this is a personal question, Rob, having done this investigative work,
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: what parts of the most authentic Rob have, have clarified
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: for you as you've become aware of the impact of
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: these various things?
• 37:28
  Speaker 6: Yeah, that's, uh, yeah, that's difficult to say. Um, So
• 37:33
  Speaker 6: writing memoirs is challenging because it's still storytelling and you
• 37:39
  Speaker 6: still have to give the reader a sense of coherence.
• 37:44
  Speaker 6: And you can't just tell one story after the other
• 37:46
  Speaker 6: of this happened and then this happened and so on.
• 37:48
  Speaker 6: It has to sort of have a connective tissue throughout
• 37:52
  Speaker 6: so that the reader doesn't get lost or keep asking, well,
• 37:54
  Speaker 6: what's the point of this? Why are you telling me
• 37:56
  Speaker 6: these stories? One thing that became apparent to me Well,
• 38:00
  Speaker 6: I guess there were two. One was that I was
• 38:04
  Speaker 6: always kind of a curious kid. I had always been
• 38:08
  Speaker 6: interested in abstract ideas, and I had this thirst for knowledge,
• 38:15
  Speaker 6: for information, for wisdom, and I was in this kind of,
• 38:21
  Speaker 6: I don't know, intellectual drought in these environments, in foster care,
• 38:26
  Speaker 6: and then later in this working class town that I
• 38:29
  Speaker 6: had grown up in of, you know, my friends that
• 38:32
  Speaker 6: I had around me, I was probably the most academically inclined, uh,
• 38:37
  Speaker 6: among them. And even I was just barely passing my classes.
• 38:40
  Speaker 6: I graduated high school, but 2.2 GPA C minus student.
• 38:44
  Speaker 6: And I think a part of me, uh, was maybe, uh,
• 38:48
  Speaker 6: afraid of that propensity, uh, that I was a pretty
• 38:54
  Speaker 6: bright kid, um, But if I acknowledged that about myself,
• 38:59
  Speaker 6: then I would have had to raise my sights for
• 39:01
  Speaker 6: my future.
• 39:02
  Speaker 5: And I just, you know, I didn't feel worthy somehow
• 39:09
  Speaker 5: of it.
• 39:09
  Speaker 6: And there was a story I left out of the book, actually.
• 39:12
  Speaker 6: So very early on, shortly after I enlisted, I arrived
• 39:17
  Speaker 6: at my first duty station in Washington State.
• 39:19
  Speaker 5: This was McCourt Air Force Base.
• 39:22
  Speaker 6: My supervisor said, noticed my test scores and my just
• 39:27
  Speaker 6: general enthusiasm. I just threw myself into the job. and
• 39:30
  Speaker 6: I was doing very well in terms of the training.
• 39:33
  Speaker 6: And he suggested to me that we put a package together,
• 39:36
  Speaker 6: an application to maybe for essentially for me to apply
• 39:40
  Speaker 6: for the Air Force Academy and sort of get fast
• 39:43
  Speaker 6: tracked into becoming an officer. And this is like You know,
• 39:46
  Speaker 6: it's very rare for a young enlisted kid to be
• 39:48
  Speaker 6: offered something like this. And I was I think I
• 39:51
  Speaker 6: was 18, maybe 19 at this point.
• 39:56
  Speaker 5: And I just said no. Like, I didn't even think
• 39:59
  Speaker 5: about it. I was like, I know. Thanks. Like, I'm good. And,
• 40:03
  Speaker 5: you know, it's funny.
• 40:04
  Speaker 6: Just I made the right decision by enlisting, but then
• 40:07
  Speaker 6: threw away this opportunity simply because I just didn't feel
• 40:13
  Speaker 6: worthy of it.
• 40:14
  Speaker 5: And I didn't really I.
• 40:15
  Speaker 6: Felt like, oh, I've I've all it was something like
• 40:18
  Speaker 6: I've already gotten pretty far. Like the fact that I
• 40:20
  Speaker 6: made it through all the training, I'm doing well right now.
• 40:22
  Speaker 6: Maybe this is about as good as I can hope for.
• 40:25
  Speaker 6: Maybe I've sort of reached the ceiling as far as
• 40:27
  Speaker 6: what I'm capable of, what I could hope for myself.
• 40:31
  Speaker 6: And maybe some part of me thought I didn't even
• 40:32
  Speaker 6: deserve that. So so I declined that. And the other
• 40:36
  Speaker 6: was just the the other lesson, I suppose, was, you know,
• 40:40
  Speaker 6: through through authoring. those early experiences all the way up
• 40:44
  Speaker 6: till fairly recently, I could pinpoint the moments when I
• 40:48
  Speaker 6: actually exerted some agency, uh, and made my own decisions
• 40:54
  Speaker 6: and realize that, you know, there are all these uncontrollable
• 40:57
  Speaker 6: forces that govern our lives and that, yeah, you know, there,
• 41:03
  Speaker 6: there is limited control that we can exert, but there
• 41:05
  Speaker 6: is some, it's not, it's not zero. And I can tell, Oh,
• 41:08
  Speaker 6: that was a moment when I made a decision and
• 41:09
  Speaker 6: it went well. And there was a moment where I
• 41:11
  Speaker 6: made a decision and it went poorly. So that just
• 41:14
  Speaker 6: reinforced for me that still it's true, not just for
• 41:18
  Speaker 6: these stories that I'm telling in the book, but also
• 41:19
  Speaker 6: for my actual life right now, that I can exert
• 41:22
  Speaker 6: some agency and not just feel subject to external forces.
• 41:29
  Speaker 4: You also mention, you know, you have just mentioned, and
• 41:33
  Speaker 4: it's in the book, about the relationship to class and ease, right?
• 41:38
  Speaker 4: Are you at ease saying, oh, yeah, great, I could
• 41:42
  Speaker 4: go to the Air Force Academy and I could become
• 41:43
  Speaker 4: an officer? Of how many different worlds we're comfortable in,
• 41:48
  Speaker 4: in lots of respects, but especially that world of class of,
• 41:55
  Speaker 4: you know, could I really go to a university like Yale?
• 42:00
  Speaker 4: And we could literalize it of, am I comfortable living
• 42:04
  Speaker 4: abroad for years? Am I comfortable trying something new that
• 42:08
  Speaker 4: seems beyond my reach, out of my comfort zone? Comes up,
• 42:13
  Speaker 4: I think, in a lot of ways, including the interior
• 42:17
  Speaker 4: realm of to what extent can I feel my feelings
• 42:23
  Speaker 4: and examine myself, read these books and have these encounters
• 42:30
  Speaker 4: and push my own boundaries, inner boundaries and outer world boundaries? Versus,
• 42:35
  Speaker 4: you know, hey, I'm good.
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: And I think, Deb, what the sociological literature says, which
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: I'm not super familiar with, so I'm sort of making
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: this up, but is that issue of ease that you
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: just pinpointed, that's pretty much what upper middle class parents
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: try to confer to their children. Even kind of unconsciously, like,
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: we're going to give you broadening experiences. We're going to
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: You're going to spend the summer on a college campus,
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: or you're going to spend some time abroad. And that's
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: what we're doing, right, is that we're conferring ease. And
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: I think, Rob, somewhere in the book you mentioned, and
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: I think you were quoting Paul Fussell about what puts
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: you into the upper class, I suppose, is having at
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: least one parent who went to college. Am I recalling
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: that correctly? And I have some analizands who were raised poor.
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: And it's a thing. It's a whole thing because there's
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: so much shame and that kind of lack of ease
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: and never feeling worthy. And I saw one of these
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: people in the past week or so. And I said,
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: can you just remind me, did one of your parents
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: go to college? She said, no. And I said, yep.
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: And we were talking about this, how hard won her
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: ease has been Which brings me back to a question
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: that I have for you. You said, oh, no, thanks,
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: not the Air Force Academy. How, a few years later,
• 44:06
  Speaker 2: did you think, yeah, yeah, what changed in you to
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: allow you to inhabit that possibility?
• 44:14
  Speaker 6: Yeah, by that point, I was 24 years old. I'd
• 44:19
  Speaker 6: done quite a bit of self-work. I describe in the
• 44:24
  Speaker 6: book how I was in rehab and, you know, received
• 44:29
  Speaker 6: some therapy and.
• 44:30
  Speaker 5: Had read a lot of books.
• 44:32
  Speaker 6: And by that point, you know, I'd been in for
• 44:35
  Speaker 6: six or seven years in the Air Force and I'd
• 44:37
  Speaker 6: had a lot of leadership experiences and.
• 44:41
  Speaker 5: Traveled a lot.
• 44:42
  Speaker 6: And, you know, without fail, you know, all of my
• 44:46
  Speaker 6: performance reports were exceedingly good. And so I think all
• 44:51
  Speaker 6: of those experiences collectively just, you know, gradually informed me that,
• 44:55
  Speaker 6: you know, I'm actually a pretty competent person. And that,
• 45:00
  Speaker 6: you know, if I were going to start from square one, and,
• 45:04
  Speaker 6: you know, essentially go back to college and be 25
• 45:07
  Speaker 6: years old with a bunch of 18 year olds that
• 45:09
  Speaker 6: I at least wanted to shoot as high as I could.
• 45:12
  Speaker 6: And so, yeah, I went to Yale and, you know,
• 45:18
  Speaker 6: it wasn't a I didn't feel the ease when I
• 45:20
  Speaker 6: got there, which I described in the book, you know,
• 45:21
  Speaker 6: this kind of fish out of water experience of, being
• 45:24
  Speaker 6: around a bunch of students who had, you know, gone
• 45:26
  Speaker 6: to expensive private boarding schools and had essentially trained their
• 45:29
  Speaker 6: whole lives to go to a university like that and
• 45:32
  Speaker 6: who knew how to handle the reading load and the
• 45:35
  Speaker 6: kind of subtleties of what it meant to do well
• 45:38
  Speaker 6: in a class versus not. And, you know, so when
• 45:40
  Speaker 6: I was in high school, a B was a good grade. Oh,
• 45:43
  Speaker 6: you get an A. A is great and a B
• 45:44
  Speaker 6: is good and a C is average. You know, that's
• 45:46
  Speaker 6: the kind of template. And then at Yale, it was
• 45:49
  Speaker 6: an A is good and.
• 45:51
  Speaker 5: An A minus is bad. And I didn't.
• 45:54
  Speaker 6: And then like, you know, a B plus is like,
• 45:56
  Speaker 6: you didn't really go to class, and you kind of
• 45:58
  Speaker 6: put in a half hearted effort.
• 45:59
  Speaker 5: And I didn't know this.
• 46:01
  Speaker 6: And so, so no one fails at these universities, elite universities,
• 46:05
  Speaker 6: the reason they have such high graduation rates is you
• 46:07
  Speaker 6: have to try to fail, everyone graduates, but then there
• 46:10
  Speaker 6: are these subtleties of, you know, a 3.7 GPA means
• 46:13
  Speaker 6: this and a 3.9 means that and everyone feels like
• 46:17
  Speaker 6: on paper, you know, everything looks great. But of course,
• 46:20
  Speaker 6: you know, these these metrics get corrupted. And so students
• 46:23
  Speaker 6: start to stress out over the difference between an A
• 46:25
  Speaker 6: and an A minus and then how to handle the
• 46:28
  Speaker 6: reading load and the assignments and just all of it.
• 46:33
  Speaker 5: The students just knew how to do it.
• 46:35
  Speaker 6: And of course, not only had they personally sort of
• 46:38
  Speaker 6: trained through their own educational experiences, but they had friends,
• 46:40
  Speaker 6: you know, oh, my older brother went to Yale and
• 46:42
  Speaker 6: he gave me the notes for this class already. So
• 46:45
  Speaker 6: I have a Google Doc with everything I need to
• 46:46
  Speaker 6: know for this class, because, you know, my friend graduated
• 46:49
  Speaker 6: from here last year, or whatever it was, and I
• 46:50
  Speaker 6: had no connections to the university like that. And so
• 46:54
  Speaker 6: all of those things made it difficult on the academic front.
• 46:57
  Speaker 6: And then on the kind of social front to learning
• 46:59
  Speaker 6: how to get along with these students who are not
• 47:02
  Speaker 6: only much younger than me, but had had completely different
• 47:05
  Speaker 6: life experiences where, you know, by the time I was
• 47:07
  Speaker 6: 18 years old, I'd worked a series of jobs and, and,
• 47:11
  Speaker 6: you know, had been listed in all this. And, you know,
• 47:13
  Speaker 6: a lot of these, you know, they'd never worked a job.
• 47:16
  Speaker 6: They'd never paid taxes, anything like that. They were just
• 47:18
  Speaker 6: kids still. And, you know, I noted in the book
• 47:23
  Speaker 6: about how our standard for what counts as an adult
• 47:28
  Speaker 6: versus a kid, that varies based on class that, you know,
• 47:33
  Speaker 6: a 20 year old who never goes to college and
• 47:36
  Speaker 6: maybe goes straight into the workforce or joins the military,
• 47:41
  Speaker 6: that's an adult. But if you're a 20 year old
• 47:43
  Speaker 6: on a college campus, you're still a kid. And, you know,
• 47:46
  Speaker 6: I saw some of, you know, we saw a bit
• 47:47
  Speaker 6: of this recently with some of the demonstrations on college campuses.
• 47:50
  Speaker 6: And I'm seeing people say, oh, you know, these these
• 47:53
  Speaker 6: Harvard Law students, they're just a bunch of kids. And
• 47:55
  Speaker 6: I'm thinking, like, if you're 27 years old at Harvard Law,
• 47:58
  Speaker 6: you get to be a kid until you're 27. I mean,
• 48:01
  Speaker 6: when do you get to become an adult then? And
• 48:04
  Speaker 6: so the college just seemed to prolong adolescence and then
• 48:07
  Speaker 6: grad school and so on. And although I was 25,
• 48:09
  Speaker 6: I was still relatively young. I felt I felt old.
• 48:13
  Speaker 6: And what I what I sometimes say is I actually
• 48:16
  Speaker 6: kind of aged in reverse because each additional semester and
• 48:18
  Speaker 6: each year that I was on campus, I sort of
• 48:20
  Speaker 6: shed that old kind of military attitude and just sort of,
• 48:24
  Speaker 6: you know, gradually assimilated into the academic environment and became,
• 48:31
  Speaker 6: you know, a student. And and it was actually nice
• 48:34
  Speaker 6: and nice to have that experience.
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: Rob, when I was listening to your presentation, your book.
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: And it was nice that you narrated it yourself because
• 48:44
  Speaker 3: I felt like you were talking to me as I
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: was listening to the audio book. One of the things
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: that I heard in your book is the transition between
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: things not mattering to things mattering. And so people who've
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: been raised in traumatogenic homes, people that have been raised
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: with few choices and a tremendous amount of suffering, one
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: of the ways that they defend against despair is to say,
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. This doesn't matter. That
• 49:18
  Speaker 3: doesn't matter. It's a way of kind of dismissing or
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: coating things in a kind of mist so that we're
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: not plagued by them. This is a very common defense
• 49:31
  Speaker 3: that children discover as a coping mechanism. For some people,
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: that can still haunt them. well into adulthood, or they
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: can collapse back into it in the face of adversity,
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: which of course makes them very vulnerable. But one of
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: the things that happened in your life is that things
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: began to matter. And so I'm wondering if you can
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: speak to that transition from things not mattering to things
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: really mattering, which then changes your relationship to your life
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: and to the choices around you.
• 50:09
  Speaker 6: Well, early on in my life, everything was so fleeting
• 50:16
  Speaker 6: and unstable that, like you'd mentioned, I think there is
• 50:21
  Speaker 6: a kind of protective function there of, okay, so I'm
• 50:26
  Speaker 6: moving to another home now. Well, eventually you just sort of,
• 50:31
  Speaker 6: I learned to shut off my feelings and just accept
• 50:33
  Speaker 6: it and go to the next home. I mean, those
• 50:35
  Speaker 6: early chapters of the book were difficult to write not
• 50:39
  Speaker 6: necessarily the experiences themselves, but because of the lack of
• 50:43
  Speaker 6: power or agency, that sort of feeling of powerlessness and vulnerability.
• 50:47
  Speaker 6: I didn't expect that to be so difficult to delve
• 50:51
  Speaker 6: into and write about. And so just having all of my,
• 51:01
  Speaker 6: every aspect of my life taken like that of, oh,
• 51:04
  Speaker 6: you're living here now, or I would befriend one of
• 51:07
  Speaker 6: my foster siblings, and then they would be taken, and
• 51:09
  Speaker 6: I would have no say or no input at all.
• 51:12
  Speaker 6: It was just devastating for a little kid. And then
• 51:19
  Speaker 6: each time something positive happened in my life, it always
• 51:25
  Speaker 6: seemed like right around the corner, a catastrophe was waiting.
• 51:30
  Speaker 5: And so.
• 51:32
  Speaker 6: I think this started to change for me, probably once
• 51:38
  Speaker 6: once I left home. And I mean, it probably started actually,
• 51:44
  Speaker 6: once I got a job and realized that, you know,
• 51:48
  Speaker 6: I was being held accountable for something. And, you know,
• 51:51
  Speaker 6: even something as simple as, you know, I was a dishwasher.
• 51:54
  Speaker 6: So it wasn't like the highest stakes jobs in the world.
• 51:56
  Speaker 5: But I'd I had a place to be and I
• 51:58
  Speaker 5: was earning money for it.
• 51:59
  Speaker 6: And so that was kind of step one of, Oh,
• 52:01
  Speaker 6: like there's this reliable relationship between inputs and outputs of,
• 52:07
  Speaker 6: I do this and then this happens. And so something
• 52:10
  Speaker 6: here does matter. And then later when I left home,
• 52:13
  Speaker 6: joined the military, same kind of experience, just at a
• 52:16
  Speaker 6: kind of higher stakes and realizing that other people relied
• 52:22
  Speaker 6: on me and that what I did, um, had.
• 52:26
  Speaker 5: Um, consequences.
• 52:29
  Speaker 6: Eventually, towards the end of Troubled, you know, I was
• 52:32
  Speaker 6: 20 years old by the time I had this realization was,
• 52:34
  Speaker 6: you know, early on, I spent, especially my teenage years
• 52:38
  Speaker 6: and early adulthood, I think this is actually a common experience,
• 52:41
  Speaker 6: because I've had a few people describe this to me
• 52:44
  Speaker 6: of how to become self-reliant, self-sufficient, you don't want to
• 52:48
  Speaker 6: depend on anyone, you don't want to rely on anyone,
• 52:50
  Speaker 6: you want to be your own person. And maybe that's
• 52:55
  Speaker 6: adaptive during those early adult years of learning how to
• 52:58
  Speaker 6: become a self-sufficient person. Uh, but eventually once I was
• 53:05
  Speaker 6: able to do that for myself, uh, and realized ultimately
• 53:09
  Speaker 6: it was unfulfilling to just be on some level selfish, uh, just,
• 53:15
  Speaker 6: it's all about me and what can I do and
• 53:16
  Speaker 6: what can I experience and putting my own needs first, um,
• 53:22
  Speaker 6: thinking about my adoptive family, about my mother and my
• 53:24
  Speaker 6: sister and then my own future family of, you know,
• 53:28
  Speaker 6: now that I've become self-sufficient, now how do I become
• 53:32
  Speaker 6: that reliable person? How can I become a dependable person?
• 53:36
  Speaker 6: That seemed to me a more fulfilling path. And so
• 53:39
  Speaker 6: I've been working on it.
• 53:40
  Speaker 5: I'm not like, I'm not all.
• 53:40
  Speaker 6: The way there yet, but I've been trying to become
• 53:43
  Speaker 6: a better brother, better son and all that.
• 53:46
  Speaker 5: And it is more fulfilling.
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: That's a great question, Joseph. And I'm, Rob, I just
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: say I'm looking at my highlights. I highlighted the sentence,
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: the military asked that I put myself in the service
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: of something higher than myself.
• 54:04
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.
• 54:05
  Speaker 6: That, you know, demanding something of people is actually can
• 54:10
  Speaker 6: actually be beneficial. I mean, when you're when you're a
• 54:11
  Speaker 6: small child, small tasks, I tell this story about how
• 54:15
  Speaker 6: I had these My adoptive mother, she was in a
• 54:18
  Speaker 6: relationship with a woman named Shelly and how they had
• 54:21
  Speaker 6: these chores for me and how I'd argue about these chores.
• 54:25
  Speaker 5: But it was actually good for me.
• 54:27
  Speaker 6: At the time, I didn't realize that I was just
• 54:29
  Speaker 6: a kid. But in hindsight, you know, just the feeling
• 54:32
  Speaker 6: that I was contributing to the house, to my family. And,
• 54:38
  Speaker 6: you know, those those moments meant, you know, those are
• 54:40
  Speaker 6: the memories that I have. Those are the things that
• 54:41
  Speaker 6: I remember that played, I think, an outsized role in
• 54:44
  Speaker 6: my my youth.
• 54:47
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking about how your outer world journey so parallels
• 54:51
  Speaker 4: the inner world journey and what happens to a kid who,
• 54:59
  Speaker 4: you know, you're powerless and you're just not even seen.
• 55:03
  Speaker 4: How you're going to feel about moving to another home
• 55:05
  Speaker 4: doesn't really even, it's not even part of the picture.
• 55:09
  Speaker 4: It's just going to happen. Or one of your, you know,
• 55:13
  Speaker 4: foster siblings is moved to another home. of that unseen quality.
• 55:19
  Speaker 4: And then that journey that you took to, you know,
• 55:24
  Speaker 4: from a Jungian perspective, we would call ego development. I've
• 55:28
  Speaker 4: been tasked with certain chores at home and I have
• 55:30
  Speaker 4: to do them. People keep telling me that I can
• 55:34
  Speaker 4: do this or I should strive for that. And we
• 55:38
  Speaker 4: get to that place of competence in the world and self-reliance.
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: And we want in the first half of life for
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: everybody to develop ego strength, something that's flexible and competent
• 55:51
  Speaker 4: and so on. And then that other place in midlife of,
• 55:58
  Speaker 4: you know, what am I really doing? I accomplished the
• 56:03
  Speaker 4: tasks of the first half of life. Now I can reflect.
• 56:08
  Speaker 4: I can think about relationships. I can consider other aspects
• 56:13
  Speaker 4: of myself. And how do I become a better, from
• 56:19
  Speaker 4: my point of view, how do we become a better grandmother, wife,
• 56:24
  Speaker 4: citizen in the world? And that's a very different trajectory
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: from the status. That's still an external world orientation. How
• 56:34
  Speaker 4: do people see me? You know, am I driving the
• 56:38
  Speaker 4: right kind of car or wearing the quote, right kind
• 56:42
  Speaker 4: of clothes, unquote. We hope that there will be that
• 56:47
  Speaker 4: place of self-reflection and self-acceptance and the ability to know
• 56:55
  Speaker 4: oneself and then be generous and generative in the world
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: and to people we care about.
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: Rob, how did you learn how to regulate your intense feelings.
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: There's stories of you being a young kid and having
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: quite a temper and just popping somebody in the eye,
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: you know, provoked you. And here today in our conversation,
• 57:21
  Speaker 3: you're a very quiet, thoughtful person. And that had to
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: be earned, I imagine.
• 57:29
  Speaker 5: Uh, yes, that's, that's right. I mean, well, well, part
• 57:31
  Speaker 5: of it is just getting older.
• 57:33
  Speaker 6: Um, you know, I, very, very few, I think people
• 57:40
  Speaker 6: are as confrontational at, in their thirties as they are
• 57:44
  Speaker 6: in their teens. And so, you know, I, of course,
• 57:48
  Speaker 6: you know, I, I, that was just, uh, how that,
• 57:50
  Speaker 6: you know, I think this, this may in itself be
• 57:52
  Speaker 6: a kind of characteristic of, of class of just the
• 57:54
  Speaker 6: willingness of young males to be, hostile and ready to
• 57:58
  Speaker 6: go physically at a moment's notice. And, you know, with time,
• 58:04
  Speaker 6: with maturity and, you know, all the experiences I had
• 58:09
  Speaker 6: later in the military and so on, I think I,
• 58:11
  Speaker 6: you know, I just learned to, you know, you know,
• 58:15
  Speaker 6: I mentioned earlier, I felt the feelings, but I can
• 58:18
  Speaker 6: choose a different way. And I still have that. And,
• 58:24
  Speaker 6: you know, and sometimes it's just, I think it's just luck.
• 58:27
  Speaker 6: I mean, weirdly. So the other day I was walking just,
• 58:30
  Speaker 6: where was I? I was just walking and taking a
• 58:32
  Speaker 6: walk outside and I locked eyes with this guy on
• 58:35
  Speaker 6: his bicycle.
• 58:36
  Speaker 5: It's almost like, you know, it's funny.
• 58:37
  Speaker 6: I have this, a very similar scene in my book,
• 58:39
  Speaker 6: this guy on a bridge riding a bicycle and then
• 58:41
  Speaker 6: he attempts to, so almost similar circumstances, weirdly enough, but I'm,
• 58:46
  Speaker 6: I'm recovering from an injury right now. And he stops
• 58:49
  Speaker 6: and he says, why are you looking at me? He
• 58:51
  Speaker 6: gets right in my face and says, why are you
• 58:52
  Speaker 6: looking at me? And I'm, I don't know if you're
• 58:55
  Speaker 6: allowed to swear on this podcast, but I said, get
• 58:57
  Speaker 6: the F out of my face. But inside, I'm like, man, like,
• 59:01
  Speaker 6: I'm injured. That was not the right thing to say.
• 59:03
  Speaker 6: But then fortunately, another guy walks by and sees that
• 59:07
  Speaker 6: we're in this kind of verbal altercation and he kind of,
• 59:10
  Speaker 6: you know, just a completely strange, you know, strange person
• 59:12
  Speaker 6: walking by saying, hey, what's going on here? Just, you know, guys,
• 59:15
  Speaker 6: get out of here.
• 59:15
  Speaker 5: What are you doing?
• 59:16
  Speaker 6: Because I actually live in a pretty nice neighborhood. But
• 59:18
  Speaker 6: this guy who was on a bicycle was probably not.
• 59:20
  Speaker 6: He probably doesn't live here. So, you know, occasionally things happen.
• 59:24
  Speaker 6: I think if that had happened when I was 17,
• 59:27
  Speaker 6: that would have just been, you know. One or both
• 59:30
  Speaker 6: of us would have had the police called and it
• 59:32
  Speaker 6: would have turned into something else. And so anyway, generally,
• 59:36
  Speaker 6: I think it is just getting older and attempting to
• 59:39
  Speaker 6: exert some self-control. And the other thing is, it's not
• 59:44
  Speaker 6: so much about the individual, but the environment. And what
• 59:46
  Speaker 6: I mean by that is, if you're in a place
• 59:49
  Speaker 6: full of people like how I was when I even
• 59:54
  Speaker 6: if you aren't necessarily an aggressive person, you will find
• 59:56
  Speaker 6: yourself in altercations with people who are seeking it out
• 59:59
  Speaker 6: the way that this guy probably was on his bike.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 6: But if you're in a nice neighborhood where people have
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 6: money and people have lived relatively safe and comfortable lives,
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 6: you know, you just don't ever find yourself in a
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 6: position where confrontation like that could happen in the first place.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 6: And so even if you are a confrontational type, it
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 6: just never occurs in your world. And so I've noticed
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 6: that too, that Ever since I've went off to college,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 6: everyone's so nice. Everyone is so like, I mean, they're physically,
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 6: you know, they're polite. And, you know, of course, there's
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 6: like verbal backbiting and rumors and gossip. There are other
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 6: ways that aggression is expressed. But physically, no one ever
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 6: wants to fight. And that's kind of nice.
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: I'm sure it is.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 5: It's a relief.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: Before we started recording, you mentioned, uh, the hero's journey
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 2: and that someone had pointed out to you that that
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 2: kind of was a template for your experiences. Do you
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: identify with that? Is that something that speaks to you?
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 6: Um, yeah, I, a friend of mine, he'd read an
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 6: early version of the manuscript. Um, and he said, you know,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 6: this is a hero's journey. And I asked him what
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 6: that was. He referenced Joseph Campbell. I flipped a bit through, um,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 6: Hero with a Thousand Faces.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: Hero with a Thousand Faces.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 6: And then that was actually one of the avenues that
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 6: took me to Jung, because I realized that, you know,
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 6: the hero's journey idea, Campbell popularized it, but I guess
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 6: he was sort of drawing on ideas that were original
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 6: to Jung. I don't know if I identify with it.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 6: You know, it's because it seems so, at least the
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 6: Campbell version, it just seems so fantastical. And so I
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 6: guess I just have a little bit of difficulty connecting
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 6: the more mythical and fantastical elements to the kind of
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 6: concrete realities. But I suppose if I attempt to sort
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 6: of draw those parallels, I can see some of it.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 6: The connection between starting in one place and ending up
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 6: in another, the You know, even at the very end
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 6: of my book where I attempt to, what is it,
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 6: like return with the elixir. I didn't know this is
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 6: what I was doing. But just what did I learn
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 6: through all of this? And then here, you know, here's
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 6: the information. Here's the quote unquote treasure that I've discovered.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 6: That kind of thing. So I can see that there's that.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 6: I can see the parallels to some extent.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 4: I think part of it is the parallel between first
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 4: and second half of life.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: Tasks.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 4: That I just touched on a little while ago, that
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 4: the hero's journey is about getting out into the world.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 4: And in mythology, it might be slaying the dragon or
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 4: finding the water of life, the elixir. It's imaged in many,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 4: many different ways. And that then the return in the
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 4: second half of life is, it's not quite so magical as, hey, everybody,
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 4: guess what? Here's the elixir. But it is a turning
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 4: inward journey. and being oneself and having oneself to offer
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 4: to others, that I'm here. It's not so much all
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 4: I can do and all the skills I have and
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 4: achieving more and buying better cars or bigger houses, but
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 4: a sense of self-reflection, self-knowledge, and being present And that's
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 4: what we really do have to offer others in the
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 4: final analysis. All we have is ourselves. Whatever we do,
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 4: we do with ourselves. And we have to get out
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 4: there and learn in the world and from the world.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 4: And then we have to get in here and become
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 4: ourselves in a way that takes reflection.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 5: Yeah, one of the.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 6: concerns that I had early on when I was writing
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 6: this book was if anyone would connect with it, because
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 6: I've had such an unusual set of experiences. And most
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 6: people aren't particularly familiar with the foster care system, or
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 6: the kind of neighborhood that I grew up in, in
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 6: Red Bluff, and all of the details that I share there.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 6: And so I wondered if this would be so far
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 6: removed from people's reality, the reader's reality, that it just
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 6: wouldn't hold their interest. But my understanding of the hero's
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 6: journey is that it's supposed to be universal, that it's
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 6: a template that everyone can understand. And so, you know,
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 6: I guess that is one thing that I've been surprised
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 6: by is people who have had very different life experiences
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 6: from me can still connect with the story. And, you know,
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 6: maybe they come from a more comfortable life background, wealthier
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 6: or what have you, but they had a parent who
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 6: was an alcoholic or they had a family tragedy or
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 6: unexpected catastrophe of.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 5: One form or another.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 6: And through that, they're able to, that's kind of a
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 6: portal for them to understand the experiences that I share.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 6: And so, yeah, from that perspective, I can see that
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 6: the hero's journey is, yeah, there is a universal element
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 6: to it.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 4: And the flip side of the hero's journey, I think,
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 4: is the archetype of the orphan. These are universal human themes,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: both of those things of feeling you know, alone and
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 4: unseen and am I going to make it? You know,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 4: so I'm not at all surprised that people relate to
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 4: your journey because it's part of so many inner world
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 4: journeys that people who may have grown up in materially
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 4: more fortunate circumstances, nonetheless, these are human themes and human experiences.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, to your comment, Deb, about the archetype of the orphan,
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 2: there was that one moment, I think it was when
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: you were, the woman who made you clean the pool,
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 2: was that Miss Martinez? Is that right?
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 5: That's right.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: This really Dickensian kind of villain. And you describe a
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 2: neighbor walking by and sort of checking in on you
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: and then just continuing to walk. And you had this realization,
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 2: I'm really alone. I think I'm recalling that correctly.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 2: But that, you know, that is that moment, I think,
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 2: that you're getting to that kind of an existential awareness
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: of our aloneness in the world, which is a terrible,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: terrible thing to have to feel as you did, Rob,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 2: as a young child. And yet there is something about
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: knowing that that can set us on a path because
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: we recognize that we're the only ones who are going
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 2: to make a difference in our lives.
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: So there can be a way that it's clarifying to
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: know that.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 6: Yeah, sometimes people will say, they talk about the wonder
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 6: of being a child or they say that being a teenager,
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 6: these are the best years and so on. And maybe
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 6: generally speaking, that's true. But I'm just so grateful to
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 6: be an adult and to just have that control over
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 6: my life. And I remember even as a 17, 18-year-old kid,
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 6: just moving away from everything. And even though I was
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 6: in this very rigid structure of all these rules and
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 6: so on and regulations and the military organization and that hierarchy,
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 6: there was a predictability there. And I sort of knew
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 6: what I could get away with and what I couldn't
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 6: and having the boundaries and knowing how much agency I
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 6: could exert and so on.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 5: It was just really freeing.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 6: I needed all eight of those years, you know, to
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 6: Joseph's earlier question of how I, you know, sort of
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 6: evolved and matured over time, which is I needed all
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 6: eight of those years to finally become a functional adult.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 6: So that by the time I was 25 and started
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 6: college and, you know, yeah, all these kids, they want
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 6: to go, you know, party and drink and, oh, there's
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 6: exams tomorrow, but I can still get six hours sleep
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 6: as long as we get home by this time. And
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 6: I'm like, I'm just, you know, I had no interest
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 6: in that. And, you know, to realize that, you know,
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 6: how to manage my time, all of those things.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: One other place that I'd like to go, if we can,
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: is going back a little bit, for example, to how
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: do we understand class from a Jungian perspective or what
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: the heck can a Jungian perspective bring to this discussion?
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: It seems to me that perhaps an interest in alchemy
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: or astrology or myth is a little arcane and inaccessible, perhaps,
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: to some. I mean, Jung is difficult to read, too.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: But the need for meaning transcends class. That truly is universal.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: And Jung, of course, does try to address what is
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: universal in the human spirit. And so I do like
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: to think that Jungian psychiatry does have some medicine for
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: us all and perhaps can serve to unite us or
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 2: broaden our perspective and help us perhaps to feel more
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: into the plight of others who have had very different
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: experiences from us and and what to do about the
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 2: larger structural issues that make Jungian analysis difficult to access.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 2: I don't know that I have any startling insights about that,
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: but I did just want to touch on that briefly.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 2: I think it's been in our discussion somewhat, Rob, because
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: you talked about kind of recognizing that you could be
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: a better person, you could be in service to something larger,
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 2: and I think that's often where meaning springs from. You said,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: I'm going to be a better son or a better brother.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: So I feel like we're trying to create some kind
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 3: of a bridge from Rob's narrative, his autobiography, to some
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: Jungian concepts. He's done a bit of that work for
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 3: us by talking about the hero's myth. In a nutshell,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: The hero's myth in general is that movement from dependency
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 3: upon a parental figure to full autonomy and gaining whatever
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 3: skills one needs in order to be in the world
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 3: effectively and dynamically. And that can be imagined in any
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 3: number of different myths, fairy tales, whether it's Star Wars
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: or whether it's the Fisher King, one thing or another.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 3: but a way of imagining the transition from childhood to adulthood.
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 3: I think the hero's journey in some ways is appropriate
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 3: in as much as some of the archaic scenes of struggle,
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: which to many modern psyches don't seem relevant, are very
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: relevant to people who have been raised in traumatizing environments.
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 3: Because in many of the myths, the hero is struggling
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 3: for their lives. They're struggling against monsters. They're struggling against
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 3: adversity that most modern folks couldn't necessarily imagine. But when
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 3: we're raised in very adverse environments, it's not uncommon for
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 3: a child to be fighting for their life, fighting to
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 3: get enough food, fighting to get away from a monstrous adult.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 3: And what does one need to find in order to
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 3: either escape or overcome? those experiences. And when I think
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 3: about some of the things that you described in your book,
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 3: as you were saying, you wondered whether anybody could identify,
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: for instance, having a mother who just ties you to
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 3: a chair and just leaves you for extended periods of time.
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 3: For some people, that seems like a strange, horrible myth,
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: but it isn't. But often in these ancient myths, those
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 3: stories of remarkable challenges remain. So it often is in
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: that mythic realm that we can still have a feeling
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 3: for extraordinary adversity that is overcome and that the triumph
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 3: of the hero is that he is often wounded, but
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 3: he wins in as much as he emerges potent enough,
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: accomplished enough, and able to command some sense of success
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: and autonomy in the world, and not become a monster himself,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 3: which is one of the terrible challenges, of course, is
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 3: that children are always at risk for becoming what has
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 3: been done to them, to become their adversaries. We see
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 3: that sometimes in these Shows like Batman, the Marvel comics.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: Why does Batman, who's been subject to terrible things, decide
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: he's going to be a hero versus many of the criminals,
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 3: the dark figures, were exposed to terrible things and they
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 3: became nefarious and dangerous. So often it's the hero's archetype,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: Jung might say, activates inside of the human psyche and
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 3: provides a frame of meaning that points a way out
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: of over-identifying with the adversity. It points to this feeling
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 3: of overcoming the adversary instead of becoming the adversary. And
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 3: in that way, it provides a kind of psychological shield
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 3: so that eventually we select what is better ultimately more functional,
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: but also better in terms of how to situate in
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: the social environment. David pointed out perhaps the archetype of
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: the orphan, which we also see in fairy tales and myths.
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 4: Over and over.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 3: And the journey, yes, that journey from deprivation and isolation,
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 3: often to relationship. The heroic journey of the orphan is
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 3: to go from being alone to being coupled, to forging
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: the relationships that were not demonstrated in the childhood that
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: we discover we can attach. We can want someone close
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 3: to us rather than reel back out of fear they're
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 3: going to do something terrible to us. I mean, that's
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 3: the orphan's hero journey is the ability to love and
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 3: be loved, which is something some people can take for
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 3: granted for those who have not had that demonstrated to them,
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: that is a heroic feat to love and be loved.
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 3: So these universal stories can illuminate certain tasks. And I
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 3: would suspect reading your book that some of these themes
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 3: could interestingly lean into your narrative as they do to
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 3: all who have overcome remarkable adversity.
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 6: One thing that, uh, that came to mind as you
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 6: were speaking, Joseph is, uh, And I mentioned before about
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 6: the hero's journey and how I did have some difficulty
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 6: connecting those mythical and fantastical elements to the kind of
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 6: more mundane realities that I'm describing in my book. But
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 6: I wonder if these myths, these stories are more, if
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 6: they're written almost as a way to communicate those mundane
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 6: realities in a more sort of accessible and almost less
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 6: traumatic form, because one piece of feedback I get from
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 6: some readers is how difficult it is for them to
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 6: read about a child being mistreated by an adult. And
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 6: I understand that. But if you're reading about a story
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 6: of a child fighting a dragon or something, it's the
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 6: same story, but just somehow it is less upsetting.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 5: To read about.
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 6: And I wonder if myth also kind of serves that purpose.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 2: I think in a way it kind of translates it
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 2: into a higher register, which makes it universal. And because
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 2: it's not just a single person's story of triumphing over adversity,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 2: it's the potential of the human spirit to triumph over adversity.
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 2: And also it makes it mythological and therefore like symbolic.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: You know, we're in a realm that has a lot
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 2: of resonance rather than just being the concrete story. And
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 2: so there are layers of meaning there because it's symbolic.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 2: And I think it does make it more palatable in
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 2: a way or like a way to find a way in,
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: but also feels relevant to all of us.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 3: Depersonalizes it by making it universal and then consequently can
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 3: be looked at In the same way that all metaphor,
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 3: in a sense, is slightly distancing. It can expand the
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 3: language around how we can describe an experience, but it
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 3: also gives us a little bit of a buffer when
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 3: we say, oh, it's just like this. Well, we're slightly
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 3: moving a few inches away from the thing, which can
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 3: give us poetic shields. around the rawness of the actual experience,
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 3: but also myths and fairy tales because they survive because
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 3: there is something in the story that most human beings
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 3: still resonate with. That's because so many things disappear. I mean,
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 3: we can't imagine a thousand years ago, but all of
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 3: the flotsam and jetsam that's in a culture of stories
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 3: being told, why do a handful of the stories seem
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 3: to propagate From culture to culture for a thousand years,
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 3: there must be something that the general human personality can
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 3: recognize as a universal. And often it's because myths and
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 3: fairy tales also solve something on that symbolic level. And
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 3: whether it's the capacity to hold on to hope in
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 3: hopeless situations or the ability to aspire. But there's a
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 3: wonderful quote that I like. by an essayist called Chesterton.
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 3: And he writes, fairy tales do not tell children that
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 3: dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 3: tell children the dragons can be killed.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 3: So it gives us an orientation in that mythic world
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 3: to possibilities that a child might not imagine. So as
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 3: you are tied up in that chair, you are Hansel
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 3: in Hansel and Gretel where the witches put you in
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: a cage and wondering how you're going to get out
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 3: of the cage in the witch's cottage. So there are universals,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: this idea of children feeling bound and trapped is something
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 3: that shows up in fairy tales that are hundreds, if
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 3: not a thousand years old, because it is a thing
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 3: that happens either symbolically or quite literally in the world.
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 3: How does the human spirit orient to that so that
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 3: we can find a way out of even the memory
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 3: of it, let alone the actual physical experience? And of
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 3: course you are charting that and have been charting then
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 3: your story is a way of kind of getting through
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 3: a Hansel and Gretel story without being eaten by the witch.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 3: So that these metaphors of fairy tales, we can find
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 3: threads that allow us to hold and to imagine it,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 3: even from a somewhat different aesthetic.
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 4: There's such a link between the individual and the universal stories,
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 4: you know, so that fairy tales and various mythological themes
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 4: can seem outlandish and out there, but over and over again,
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 4: as we see in an individual story like your book,
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 4: the theme of you can do it, it's a theme
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 4: of empowerment. You have the right stuff. You can do
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 4: it and conquer anything. Conquer the Witch or Cinderella Goes
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 4: to the Ball, empowering different facets of empowerment that are
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 4: within us. And that's what, you know, that it's in you,
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 4: whoever that you happens to be. So what, you know,
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 4: what Joseph said of that building hope.
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 2: I'm going to take us in a totally different direction
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 2: for a minute because I'm thinking, Rob, of something you
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: said earlier, and I can't remember if we were recording
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 2: or not, but you said most of the people who
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 2: grow up in your situation are not going to turn
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: out like you do. You talked a little bit in
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: the book about who's the book for, what's the message,
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 2: and in some sense, you've said, I don't want the
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 2: message to be you should have hope because just kind
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 2: of statistically, most people who grow up in that environment
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 2: are not going to go to Yale or get a PhD.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 2: And I really heard the cry in your book that
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: there are policies and norms that can, let's say, soften
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 2: or mitigate the effects of, let's say, poverty. And that
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 2: in some sense, we've abandoned some of those over the
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 2: past 50 years or so. So I wanna give you
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 2: a chance to talk a little bit about luxury beliefs,
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 2: because I know that that's kind of a special area
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 2: of yours.
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 6: Despite my efforts, I do still receive emails from people
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 6: who have had similar lives to me, some even worse,
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 6: who actually did find my book to be a source
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 6: of hope for them and I, and I think that's
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 6: actually okay. You know, I guess what I, my, my, my,
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 6: my fear was that, um, uh, more materially, uh, uh, prosperous,
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 6: educated people would come away with it thinking, uh, well,
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 6: this guy did it. So why doesn't everyone else just
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 6: get their act together and work really hard and turn
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 6: their life around like he did? But of course, if
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 6: people like me, the way that I grew up, if
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 6: they read it and, and, and, you know, start to
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 6: rethink some of their everyday decisions and habits and practices
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 6: and find my book to be a source of meaning
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 6: and hope.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 5: That's great. So, yeah, the.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 6: Luxury beliefs idea, it started to take shape in my
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 6: mind shortly after I arrived on campus in 2015. I
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 6: arrived at Yale at a very unusual time in terms
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 6: of the ongoing debates, very contentious debates around the nature
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 6: of higher ed and what the purpose of a university
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 6: educator and what these communities are meant to do, what
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 6: their aims are.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 5: And so at Yale in 2015, maybe.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 6: Some of your listeners would be familiar with what became
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 6: known as the Halloween costume controversy at Yale. You know,
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 6: very long story short, you know, I got out of
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 6: the military in August, started class in September. And then
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 6: in October, shortly before Halloween, the Yale administration released this
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 6: email saying, you know, don't, you know, be wary of what,
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 6: you know, be mindful of what you wear for your
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 6: costume this Halloween, kind of issuing this warning against cultural appropriation,
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 6: be sensitive, so on. And then one of the professors
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 6: at Yale, she was what were then they were called
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 6: masters and associate masters. She was an associate master of
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 6: a residential college on campus. She sent an email to
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 6: her students, you know, essentially challenging this idea that telling
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 6: these students, hey, you're all adults. You know, if you
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 6: want to wear what you want to wear for Halloween,
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 6: that's fine. And, you know, if you have an issue
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 6: with it, just speak amongst yourselves. We don't need Yale bureaucratic.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 6: guidelines telling us what we should and shouldn't wear. And
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 6: in response to this very innocuous email, and it wasn't,
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 6: I read that email four or five times attempting to
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 6: discern just what was so offensive about it. And to
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 6: this day, I'm still not, I can kind of understand
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 6: because I've been so immersed in these environments that I
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 6: can almost see it. But even then, it's hard. At
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 6: that point, I had no idea. And In response to
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 6: that email, there was this eruption on campus, and hundreds
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 6: of students were marching around campus calling for her to
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 6: be fired, her husband who defended her, they wanted him
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 6: to be fired as well. He was also a professor
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 6: on campus. And that was, I don't know, six or
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 6: eight weeks into my first semester.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 5: So that was.
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 6: A very shocking introduction to higher ed.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 4: And then.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 6: when I would ask students to explain just what, what,
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 6: what was the offense here? They would get upset with
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 6: me for asking that question. And one student, I tell
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 6: this story in the book, I asked this question and
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 6: she responded by saying, I was too privileged to understand
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 6: the depth of the pain these professors had caused. And
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 6: I knew that she had attended an expensive private boarding
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 6: school and she was, you know, kind of a very
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 6: kind of conventional Yale student. But she was trained to
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 6: think about privilege in a very narrow way. And so
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 6: that was her response to my question. And then I
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 6: would have other kinds of questions or conversations with students
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 6: and ask them different kinds of questions and realize they
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 6: had completely different life experiences from me. And I'm not
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 6: just talking about undergrads, by the way. I worked in
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 6: a psychology lab where there were plenty of grad students
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 6: who were running the day-to-day operations of conducting studies and
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 6: so on. These were PhD students and postdocs. And I
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 6: would speak with professors and administrators and kind of all
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 6: across the university, I would hear views around family or around,
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 6: you know, the standard line on campus was that all
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 6: families are equal and that, you know, ideally we could
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 6: get beyond family. uh, this idea of married parenting and
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 6: find new ways to experiment with family formation. And yet
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 6: when I would ask, you know, these students, um, what, how,
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 6: how they were raised, they would tell me they were
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 6: raised by two married parents. And then when I would
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 6: ask them, well, how do you plan to have your family?
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 6: You know, if you plan on having one and they
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 6: would tell me oh, you know, I was raised by
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 6: two married parents and I'll probably do the same for
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 6: my kids. But, you know, it's not just because I
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 6: want to do it that way doesn't mean that's how
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 6: people should do it. And, you know, from my perspective,
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 6: growing up the way that I had and seeing the
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 6: kind of family fragmentation I had seen, I was essentially
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 6: hearing these people say, you know, I benefited.
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 5: From this very.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 6: Stable family structure and I plan to carry it forward
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 6: for my own kids. But officially, my stance is people
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 6: shouldn't do this. And then I learned that the vast
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 6: majority of the students on campus had come from very
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 6: stable family backgrounds. So it wasn't just a matter of money.
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 6: I knew going in that a lot of these students
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 6: would come from very affluent backgrounds. But then when I
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 6: realized that essentially every single one of them had been
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 6: raised by two married parents, And then realized, you know,
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 6: I compare that with my friends that I grew up
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 6: with in high school and how I had five close
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 6: friends growing up. And of the six of us, none
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 6: of us were raised by two married parents. That couldn't
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 6: be a coincidence that, you know, I had friends who
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 6: ended up in prison or shot. And, you know, they
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 6: had one kind of family. And then these other students
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 6: who had a different kind of family, they ended up
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 6: at a place like Yale. And it was just hard
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 6: for me to reconcile this. And sort of adopt this
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 6: view that many of these Yale students had that this
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 6: thing is just completely unimportant and has no kind of
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 6: predictive power in terms of your life course and outcomes.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 6: Same things like drug decriminalization. The line was that drugs
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 6: should be completely decriminalized. I found that hard to accept
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 6: as well because of my own experiences with substance abuse
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 6: and a lot of the people that I grew up around.
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 6: And I cite statistics in the book, too, that some
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 6: readers have been surprised by, that actually, perhaps counterintuitively, the
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 6: more education someone has, the more likely they are to
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 6: support drug decriminalization. And same with all of these other things,
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 6: family formation. And another example is selling addictive technology to
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 6: people while... exerting very careful norms at home about screen use.
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 6: And so there seemed to be this duplicity on campus.
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 6: And so eventually I coined this term luxury beliefs, ideas
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 6: and opinions that confer status on the upper class while
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 6: inflicting costs on the lower classes.
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 5: And this can take the form of policy.
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 6: I write at some length in the book about defund
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 6: the police and the consequences of that movement And, you know,
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 6: it's funny, the defund the police movement, there was an
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 6: increase in violent crime. And from 2020 to about 2022,
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 6: you would occasionally see some news coverage of this.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 5: You'd open the pages of the Wall Street.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 6: Journal and you would see year over year crime, you know,
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 6: violent crime has increased X percent since 2020, something along
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 6: those lines. But then within the last maybe year or so,
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 6: there have been very high profile cases of There was
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 6: a journalist who was killed in Philadelphia, another journalist that
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 6: was killed in New York City, a tech entrepreneur who
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 6: was stabbed in San Francisco. And so now people are
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 6: starting to recognize that this attitude toward law enforcement has
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 6: unraveled and it's starting to reach people who ordinarily wouldn't
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 6: be murdered. And these people, people like journalists and tech entrepreneurs,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 6: they received entire articles written about them. And, you know,
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 6: to me, this was an interesting double standard where if
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 6: you are a poor person who gets killed, you get
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 6: folded into these statistics. But if you are a member
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 6: of the modern aristocracy, you get an entire article written
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 6: about you and how you were killed and what your
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 6: career was and the kinds of things that you were
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 6: interested in. You know, you are treated in a very
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 6: different way.
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 3: So.
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 6: I flesh out the idea, drawing on people. We talked
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 6: about Paul Fussell. I draw on Thorstein Veblen, who wrote
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 6: this classic text in Sociology, The Theory of the Leisure Class.
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 6: Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote this book, Distinction, A Social Critique
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 6: of the Judgment of Taste, and he writes about cultural capital.
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 6: He writes about how people perform their social class. They
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 6: convert their material resources into arcane and intricate knowledge.
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 5: About wine, about art, about maybe alchemy.
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 6: And essentially they're sub-communicating. When they tell you about the
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 6: exotic locales they've traveled to or how this vintage is
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 6: different from that, they're kind of sub-communicating that. I grew
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 6: up in these circumstances, in this community, in this environment,
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 6: went to these kinds of schools and so on. And
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 6: my claim is that luxury beliefs are one expression of that.
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 6: If you adopt the view of, you know, if the
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 6: conventional view is it's good to have police, you know,
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 6: probably good idea to get married before you have kids.
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 6: There should be some laws around drug use. If that's
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 6: conventional opinion, a good way to stand out from the
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 6: masses is to adopt the opposite view on those things.
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 5: And it signals sophistication.
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 6: It signals that you probably went to a pretty expensive
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 6: college and you read certain periodicals and so on and
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 6: so forth. And so some of this is arose out
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 6: of my own personal experiences. You know, sometimes I'll go
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 6: home and talk to my mom and say, Alice, have
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 6: you heard of this acronym or that new movement or this, that,
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 6: and the other? And she's like, what are you talking about? Like,
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 6: what are they teaching you at these places? And there's
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 6: just this, and my mom is, she's a working class Democrat, right?
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 6: She's voted Democrats her whole life. So this isn't a
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 6: political issue. I think it really is about class more
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 6: so than about politics or something like that.
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 4: And maybe also it's about the danger of conflating the
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 4: ability to conceptualize that, wait a minute, should we rise
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 4: above our usual concepts around law enforcement, for example? And
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 4: let's just think about something different and how it could
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 4: be better or less regulated and concretized. And we conflate
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 4: that with sort of empirical realities around the need for regulation.
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 4: or the empirical realities about married couples who then have
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 4: children and continue to have stable households, that tends to
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 4: do better for kids' opportunities and successes in life. And
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 4: there's just a difference between what we can think of
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 4: and conceptualize and what actually tends to work for most
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 4: people most of the time in the so-called real world. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 6: And I hope, you know, I haven't received these accusations,
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 6: but I do hope, you know, when people read the
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 6: book that I, I'm not trying to be this finger
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 6: wagging moralist or something, you know, I, I grew up
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 6: around divorced families and single parents and people who use
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 6: drugs and I use drugs and, you know, it's, you know,
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 6: people are flawed and complicated and we all fall short
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 6: of our own ideals, but I do think that it's
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 6: probably better if the most influential and prominent members of
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 6: society at least attempt to pay lip service to a
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 6: good example, even with the knowledge that, look, we're all
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 6: flawed and we're all going to make mistakes. But still,
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 6: there are certain ideals we should at least aim to
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 6: strive for. I've sometimes suggested that I liked the.
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 6: There's always going to be some degree of hypocrisy in
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 6: society on the part of whatever you want to call them,
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 6: elites or the upper class.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 5: But I like the John F.
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 6: Kennedy model of hypocrisy more so than the kind we
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 6: have now, which is, you know, JFK, he was a
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 6: flawed man. But the image he presented to the American
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 6: public was, you know, he's a good husband, a good father.
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 5: He tried to do the right thing, so on and
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 5: so forth. He was a war hero.
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 6: They had this whole sort of mythology around him. But
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 6: in his private life, we know that he was a
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 6: philanderer and often an absentee father and all these shortcomings.
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 6: But he paid lip service. He thought it was important
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 6: to set an example for the public. And now I
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 6: think we almost have the opposite where now we have–
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 6: there's a Yale law professor. He wrote this great book,
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 6: The Meritocracy Trap, a couple of years ago, Daniel Markovits.
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 6: And he says that now our modern elites are non-practicing libertines.
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 6: And what he means by that is most educated people
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 6: today live very sort of bourgeois conventional lives. They get
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 6: married and they have kids. And, you know, for the
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 6: most part, they live a very sort of stable conventional life.
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 6: But if you ask them their opinions and attitudes around family,
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 6: around marriage, around, you know, behavioral transgressions and so on,
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 6: they take a very sort of relaxed attitude. So, you know,
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 6: they support libertinism, but they're non-practicing. You So the hypocrisy
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 6: is almost flipped, where it used to be you pay
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 6: lip service to conventional values, but you privately philander. Now
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 6: you publicly support philandering, but privately behave in a more
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 6: conventional way.
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 2: And so your thesis, which you go into a little
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 2: bit more in the book, is that by the elites
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 2: kind of espousing, for example, that family formation doesn't matter,
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 2: that that actually has a trickle-down effect throughout the rest
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 2: of the society. So that the elites who are off
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 2: getting married and raising kids in two parent families are
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 2: kind of passing on this, you know, this really significant
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 2: privilege of having two married parents while kind of promoting
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 2: something that we. know is harmful, even if it's seems
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 2: fashionable somehow.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 6: I think that's, that's, that's basically it. That the people
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 6: who set the example, who, um, you know, kind of
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 6: set the discourse and the conversation and what's, what's interesting,
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 6: what's trendy, you know, who set the standards around culture
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 6: and policy, I think for the most, I don't think
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 6: it's malicious. I think for the most part, it's just
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 6: a kind of naivete and a kind of willingness to
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 6: go along, to conform and, you know, jump on the bandwagon.
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 6: You know, a lot of people, uh, in, in academia
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 6: who I thought were perfectly sensible people, there was this
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 6: period of, of, uh, suspension of, uh, reflection in 2020
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 6: where they were supporting the defund the police movement. And
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 6: that was just floored by that because I thought, well,
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 6: you know, if you live in a safe neighborhood and
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 6: low crime area or gated community, then, you know, you
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 6: may not need police, but most people do. Um, and so,
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 6: so yeah, this was, um, and that was one of one,
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 6: one example of this of not really thinking through the,
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 6: the policies that you happen to be supporting. And, and
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 6: even if they, on the surface, seem sympathetic or compassionate.
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 6: Consider what are the sort of second order consequences.
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 3: Well, I think it's also the collapse of complexity. I mean,
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 3: there are problems in terms of law enforcement and how
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 3: they do or do not serve various demographics. But the
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 3: simplistic idea, well, then we should just eliminate it, is
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 3: part of that mob psychology that When large groups regress,
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 3: that their capacity to think in complex ways also collapses,
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 3: and then they're comforted by slogans. Defund the police is
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 3: a three-word solution to an enormous, complicated situation that varies
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 3: state by state, city by city, community by community. And
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 3: somehow it seems reassuring. Build the walls. Defund the police.
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 3: You know, these three-word slogans, which, oh my goodness, well,
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 3: it's that easy. That's all it will take. But again,
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 3: when large groups are put under enough stress one way
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 3: or another, they'll align with often ridiculously simplistic, almost childish
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 3: solutions and actually try to implement them. And that's dangerous,
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 3: of course.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 5: Yeah, there's that.
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 6: And I think, yeah, it's... To some extent, I understand
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 6: politics works the way it works, and you want to
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 6: build a broad coalition, and sometimes messages get simplified or diluted,
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 6: but for people who hold some prominence and some influence
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 6: in society, there should be a greater sense of responsibility there,
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 6: I think, to add a bit of the nuance and
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 6: the complexity and to really consider how this will affect
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 6: other people and you know, just to, just to bring
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 6: this back around for a moment to, um, some of
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 6: the themes of, of the earlier parts of my book that,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 6: you know, one, one, one thing that I, I, I
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 6: didn't really, um, consider until I wrote those early chapters
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 6: was how essentially the point is that young children have no,
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 6: you know, I mentioned they're completely powerless on a kind
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 6: of individual level. Um, they don't, they don't exert much
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 6: agency in their own lives, um, which is for the
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 6: most part, correct, because if you're a child, you're unsophisticated
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 6: and immature, and you don't know what's best for you.
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 6: And so you would hope that adults would do the
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 6: right thing and provide care and guidance and so forth.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 6: But then also on a political level, children can't vote.
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 6: And so they have no power there either. And so historically,
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 6: it's been a good thing that marginalized people have been
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 6: able to unite and advocate on behalf of their own interests.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 6: They have been able to vote and to exert pressure
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 6: in various ways, and so on and so forth. I think,
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 6: generally speaking, that's been a good thing. But children will
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 6: never be able to do that. They can't unite on
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 6: behalf of their own interests. They are a kind of
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 6: group that experienced the world in the same ways, and
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 6: they're historically mistreated in the same ways, and all the
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 6: kinds of things that all marginalized groups have suffered through.
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 6: But they'll never be able to do what other groups
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 6: have done on behalf of their own interests. And so
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 6: that something else to keep in mind is that adults
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 6: really do have to bear in mind the level of
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 6: responsibility we have for kids and recognize that these kids
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 6: will become adults and whatever experiences they have when they're kids,
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 6: this will have some downstream consequences on society as a whole.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 6: And so that was another point that I made of
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 6: most kids who grew up the way that I did,
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 6: they don't turn out like me.
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 5: They turn out like some of my friends who were incarcerated,
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 5: and so on.
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 3: It's poverty of imagination. Adults fail to imagine the experiences
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 3: of children, fail to imagine the experiences of people who
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 3: are not like them. And that collapse of imagination and
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 3: this collapse into literalism, and as you were saying, libertinism, sensuality,
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 3: the meeting of primal drives, I mean, all of those
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 3: things go to this collapse of imagination and consequently this
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 3: diminishment of empathy because so much of the suffering that
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 3: you experience and children often do is this interference with
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 3: imagination that generates empathy and that is often a sign
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 3: both of the environmental problems as well as personal developmental
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 3: problems in those adults so it is a spectacularly complicated
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 3: both personal and societal issue. So you've mentioned the word
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 3: policy several times. So I am kind of curious if
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 3: you are working with any policymakers or if you yourself
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 3: have a certain idea about policy changes that you think
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 3: would be valuable to consider.
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm not a policy wonk. I am more interested
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 6: in sort of individual level behavioral change, what can we do, um,
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 6: at the kind of individual or, or perhaps the family level,
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 6: you know, as far as policy goes, I have thought
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 6: about this of, you know, have there been successful policy
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 6: changes that we could potentially implement? I mean, historically has,
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 6: has anything sort of led to mass behavioral change in
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 6: a positive direction? And, and one thing that, that, that
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 6: comes to mind is, um, the anti-smoking campaigns, um, of
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 6: the eighties and the nineties were, you know, I think
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 6: a lot of people, uh, you know, if you traveled
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 6: back to 1980 and said something like, you know, whatever,
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 6: 12 in the future, 12% of Americans will smoke cigarettes
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 6: instead of whatever it was back then. I think something
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 6: on the order of 30 to 40%. Um, I think
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 6: that would have shocked a lot of people. Um, but
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 6: that was a sort of sustained public awareness campaign of
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 6: the harmful effects of tobacco, uh, And even when I
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 6: was a kid in the 90s, I would see these commercials.
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 6: It was like every third commercial, smoking will kill you.
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 6: And it didn't stop me from smoking, but it had
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 6: an effect on someone. And it did seem to work.
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 6: And even to this day, if you buy a pack
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 6: of cigarettes, it still has a warning label on it.
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 6: I mean, who doesn't know smoking is bad for you?
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 6: But I think there's something to be said for sort
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 6: of reinforcing the knowledge repeatedly. You can know something, but
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 6: It's still helpful to just have it reinforced and repeated.
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 6: And I think something like this maybe could be done
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 6: for family formation, for example, of, you know, public awareness
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 6: campaigns of, you know, if you, a child who's raised
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 6: by two married parents who have a healthy relationship, they're
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 6: X percent less likely to be incarcerated or X percent
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 6: more likely to graduate from high school and so on
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 6: and so forth, something like that. I could imagine this
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 6: would upset some people. So it would have to be
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 6: framed in a delicate way, you know? And, and so
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 6: I think something like that might potentially be helpful, but
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 6: it is, it's, it's something, you know, that that's the only,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 6: that's the only sort of policy related ideas, a kind
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 6: of public awareness campaign. The other would be kind of,
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 6: this isn't related to, to, to policy, but just more
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 6: people sharing their stories. I'm hoping that my book may
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 6: encourage other people out there with, similar stories to share
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 6: their experiences too. And, uh, you know, stories had a
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 6: large effect on me when I was a kid. And so,
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 6: you know, kids pay no attention to policy, but they will, um,
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 6: pay attention to stories. And so I'm hoping more people will,
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 6: will communicate their own experiences in that way too.
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 3: I was thinking of JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Um, it's
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 3: a different kind of story, but this, another young boy,
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 3: raised in environments that are tremendously averse and tragic. So
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 3: I think there is a willingness, as you're experiencing advances
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 3: and I'm sure others, to hear and to listen and
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 3: to see and how that's going to enter into the
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 3: collective and what the collective will do in response to
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 3: that remains to be seen. Yeah. This whole capacity to
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 3: influence the collective consciousness of a country. I mean, this
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 3: was something that psychologists have been interested in a long time.
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 3: And of course, horrific example was what we saw in
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 3: Germany leading up to World War II. But this understanding
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 3: that as media has continued to expand its influence, the
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 3: ability to influence the collective grows for good or ill.
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 3: But I remember the campaigns, for instance, in the 70s,
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 3: there was an enormous anti-littering campaign. That was very, very effective.
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 3: I mean, it looks bizarre to see somebody throw a
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 3: bag of garbage out of their car window on the
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 3: highway that's like shocking now when i was a kid
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 3: you drove down the highway there was mountains of trash
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 3: down most any highway you drove it was ubiquitous to
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 3: see somebody throw up you know a god knows a
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 3: mattress you know um and that's really changed but there
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 3: does have to be this feeling often at a federal
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 3: level that there is a particular virtue.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 2: It goes to the cultivation of virtue, doesn't it? Yeah.
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 3: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. The cultivation of a virtue and often
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 3: relatives to the collective, something that can be seen in
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 3: a very concrete way. Don't smoke, don't litter. Again, very
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 3: short slogans, but to be able to stimulate affect and
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 3: be able to, I can still remember the anti-litter commercials
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 3: in My mind, the weeping Indian at the side of
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 3: the highway. Totally iconic. And it changed, you know, the nation.
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 3: So I feel into what you're saying. The difficulty, of course,
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 3: is what is the message that the unconscious of the
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 3: nation will take in and make their own? And by
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 3: the way, if you haven't seen The Century of the Self,
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 3: It's a fantastic BBC series about the birth of mass marketing,
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 3: which interestingly was founded by Freud's nephew, who applied psychoanalytic theory,
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 3: who was the one who convinced women that they should
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 3: smoke as a symbol of establishing their freedom and taking
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 3: power into their own hands. And then the massive amount
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 3: of effort it has taken to unwind that that idea
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 3: in the collective, as if the collective is its own psyche,
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 3: one great vast psychology.
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 4: Well, and I think we're saying it's both, that there
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 4: are things we can do at the macro or collective level,
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 4: like anti-smoking campaigns, but those are designed to affect individuals.
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 4: It's not policy. It's don't litter, don't smoke. And I
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 4: think what we're seeing now is the birth rate is
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 4: declining in the United States and in other so-called first
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 4: world countries because people are making individual decisions based on,
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 4: oh my gosh, I don't think I'm ready to have children.
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 4: I can't really afford to raise children in the way
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 4: that they should be raised. So those that that's been
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 4: maybe an effect that is not altogether intended. Nonetheless, it's
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 4: a trend of you don't just, you know, couple up
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 4: when you're 19 or 25 years old and just go
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 4: ahead and have a family anymore. Now it's a conscious
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 4: decision for many people. Wait a minute. And people are
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 4: putting off having children until they've got some financial security
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 4: or really gained some traction in career. So I see
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 4: that as related somewhat to this. And what we've bypassed
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 4: in our discussion and what I think is really difficult
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 4: is social policy because there are so many unintended consequences
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 4: of you know, how do we affect change? And then
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 4: there are people like us, right, where we do it,
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 4: where there's a lot of individual work. But that's a
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 4: big question. How do we affect change? Sorry, I interrupted you.
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 3: No, no, no.
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 6: On this point of the declining fertility rate, I just
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 6: read this analysis in The Economist, which found that when
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 6: they separate the fertility rate by education level among women,
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 6: they find that college educated women, their fertility rate actually
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 6: hasn't changed that much in the past few decades. They're
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 6: having children later in life, but the overall number of
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 6: children remains roughly the same. Whereas for non-college educated women,
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 6: for working class women, the fertility rate has completely collapsed.
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 6: And that is actually what's largely responsible. And so, you know,
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 6: I'm reading this and I'm thinking about my own life experiences.
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 6: And there were various points in my childhood where I
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 6: lived with, um, teenage girls who were teen moms. And
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 6: their daughters are grown up now, and they're in their 20s,
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 6: and they haven't had kids. I myself am arguably an
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 6: example of this, where my mother was young when she
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 6: had me, and I don't have any children. And so,
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 6: you know, I do wonder how much of this, you know,
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 6: there are a variety of forces here, technology and education
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 6: and prolonged waiting and so on and so forth. But
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 6: I do wonder how much of the attitudes around marriage have,
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 6: have changed this and how much of the kind of,
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 6: you know, we've, we've, we've talked about trauma of a
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 6: generation ago. Um, if you were, uh, a young woman, uh,
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 6: from a working class background, um, a lot of these
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 6: women would have children with men and, and hope that
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 6: that would actually lead them on a path to marriage
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 6: with the father of their children. And most of the
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 6: time that never happened. And so they raised these kids
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 6: as single parents, single moms. And those daughters grew up
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 6: with their mom and no one else. And they never
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 6: saw what a healthy relationship looked like, unlike their mom.
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 6: So the teen moms of a generation ago were raised
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 6: by two parents. So they still held out the hope that, okay, well, fine,
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 6: you know, I'm with this guy and we're sleeping together
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 6: and I have a kid and maybe we just kind
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 6: of attempt this and maybe it'll lead to something like marriage.
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 5: And it never did.
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 6: Those, their daughters grew up, their kids grew up and
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 6: never even witnessed what marriage looked like, what a healthy
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 6: relationship looked like. And so they're just not having kids
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 6: at all. And the culture that they grew up in
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 6: also didn't really prioritize marriage or, or, or communicate the
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 6: importance of marriage. The vast majority of people still, if
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 6: you ask them, you know, about their, about family formation,
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 6: most people still want to be married before they have kids. Um,
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 6: and so for, All of this is to say that
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 6: I do wonder how much of the fertility crisis is
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 6: actually marriage crisis and how much of it is a
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 6: result of the kind of trauma and stress of growing
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 6: up in a family where, you know, you've never actually
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 6: seen what a healthy relationship looks like.
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 2: Well, I hope that we've sort of been able, we've
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 2: traveled really widely over this territory. And I hope we've
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 2: at least, you know, done what we do, which is
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 2: just open things up and begin a conversation about it
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 2: and circumambulate it a little bit and look at it
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 2: from different views.
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 5: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 4: Yes. Thank you for joining us.
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 2: or join our mailing list, visit our website, thisyungielife.com. If
• 1:56:46
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