Here’s my conversation with journalist Meghan Daum and clinical psychologist Andrew Hartz, Ph.D. on episode 15 of the Open Therapy podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Washington, D.C.
I’ll be speaking at the Symposium on Young American Men in conversation with Emily Yoffe. September 24. Details and registration info here.
From the archives:
“We confess our small faults only to convince people that we have no greater ones.”
The Best Sleep Upgrade I’ve Ever Had:
I’ve been using Eight Sleep for more than a year.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve had difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. I solved the first problem years ago by putting my phone on the other side of the room and reading before bed until my eyes get tired. Usually I fall asleep within 15 minutes.
But staying asleep remained an issue until I bought an Eight Sleep Pod in December 2024.
Before that, I had heard a million podcast ads for Eight Sleep and tuned them all out. Huge mistake. Now I’m annoyed I didn’t get one sooner.
When I used to wake up in the middle of the night, temperature was usually the problem. I would be too warm, or occasionally too cold, and struggle to get comfortable again.
The Eight Sleep Pod fixes that. It automatically adjusts the temperature of the bed throughout the night.
Eight Sleep also just introduced a Biological Age feature, which uses your nightly sleep, heart rate, HRV, breathing, and other data to estimate whether your body is aging faster or slower than your actual calendar age. The model was trained on 2.7 million hours of nightly recordings from more than 100,000 people, and your score updates each week as your habits change.
The great part about this is that you don’t have to wear anything. The Pod measures your heart rate, breathing, and sleep structure while you sleep.
I truly appreciate this: instead of giving you another static health score, it creates a feedback loop. Sleep better, exercise more consistently, recover properly, and you can see whether the underlying signals are moving in the right direction.
Members see up to 34 percent more deep sleep on average. Individual results may vary, but mine have not.
Exclusive Offer for My Readers
Use my code ROBHENDERSON at eightsleep.com/robhenderson for up to $350 off the Pod.
Your future well-rested self will thank you.
Links and recommendations:
Professors Against Civil Discourse by John Sailer
Who Should We Hate Now? Hollywood’s Myopic List of Acceptable Villains by Ted Balaker
Why do women sympathise with Lindsay Clancy? by Rosemary Hopcroft
Blood Boy by Hansen Shi
The Dystopian Imagination by Theodore Dalrymple
Culture Becomes a Dark Forest by Erik Hoel
Highly recommend “Our Hero, Balthazar” (2026). A darkly funny film about class, loneliness, fatherlessness, woke fishing, and performative empathy. Link to trailer
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. Since the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling deeming affirmative action illegal in higher education, the population of Asian-American students at Harvard has grown to 41% in the most recent class of enrolled students. (source).
2. In a 2024 survey of more than 6,000 professors, 35% said they had toned down their written work for fear of controversy—roughly four times the share of social scientists who admitted the same at the height of McCarthyism. (source).
3. By four years of age, girls tend to think that boys are academically inferior to them. Teachers often see their female students as academically superior, even when aptitude tests show the opposite pattern for their classes. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
Order your copy now:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
