No One Tells You What It Costs to Climb Upward

My conversation with Dr. Drew

Below is a transcript, lightly edited, with some highlights from my discussion with Dr. Drew. We spoke about the long-term effects of childhood trauma, cultural taboos, and how social class shapes people’s lives in ways most elites don’t understand. We also explored the psychological toll of upward mobility, campus politics, evolutionary psychology, luxury beliefs, and the importance of personal agency in a culture that increasingly denies its existence.

Dr. Drew Pinsky: Thank you, thank you so much. This is such a privilege to be here with you today. I cannot tell you how pleased I am to be in your life, Rob. This is not just an important story, but Troubled is a historical document. So I wonder if you could start with just a brief sketch for those who haven't read the book. Rob's story is incredible.

Dr. Rob Henderson: Thanks, Dr. Drew. Thanks to Saga and Afsa and everyone else—Brian and everyone—for helping to organize this event. And thanks to all of you for being here. It's a surreal feeling. If you had told me at age 17 that I'd be sharing a stage with Dr. Drew, that to me would have been the equivalent of saying I'd be the first astronaut to set foot on Mars. I didn't even want to be an astronaut.

So this is a surreal feeling. I wrote this book not necessarily intending—you described it as a historical document. I didn't intend it to be that way. But there's that line about how the more personal you get, the more universal the story becomes. And I've been surprised at how many people have connected with the story here.

I open the preface of the book by introducing myself to the reader with my three names and the story behind each of those names. So my first name, Robert, comes from my supposed biological father, who I never met. The only information I have about him was his name, which was in some documents from the social workers who were responsible for my case when I was in foster care.

My middle name, Kim, comes from my birth mother—it was her family name. She had come to the U.S. from Seoul, from South Korea, as a young woman. She was a college student. I think this was the early 1980s when she arrived. Her life, after a few years, started to spiral and got into drugs and addiction and all kinds of catastrophes, which I described in the early chapters of the book.

As a result of her addiction, I was placed into the foster care system when I was three and spent the next about five years living in seven different foster homes all over Los Angeles.

Dr. Drew: Not great.

Rob Henderson: Yeah, no. No, not at all.

Dr. Drew: And no food, right?

Rob Henderson: Well, yeah. There was food, but it was just not—I don’t know what the word is here—rationed appropriately. They would just put food out, the foster parents. But some of these homes had eight or ten kids living in them. The bigger kids got there first and would physically force their way to the food. There were days when we—especially me and the smaller kids—didn’t get as much as we should have.

Then I describe a story in the book about how in one of the foster homes there was a language misunderstanding. My foster mother didn’t understand that she had to fill out a document to enroll me into the free lunch program. There was a few months’ period where I wasn’t eating lunch at school.

Dr. Drew: Then you get adopted.

Rob Henderson: Then I was adopted. That’s right. Just before my eighth birthday I was adopted by the Henderson family, which is where my last name comes from. Later in life, as an adult, I took this genetic ancestry test and discovered that I'm half Hispanic on my father’s side. So I learned that my dad was Mexican. I wish I’d known that when I was applying for college.

[laughter]

So then I was adopted, and at that time—this was 1999—it was just a couple of years before I discovered Dr. Drew on the Loveline radio show. But at that time, I didn’t understand at eight years old that I was about to get this front-row seat into the deterioration and fragmentation of families in working-class, lower-middle-class communities.

Most of the people in the town that I grew up in, in Red Bluff, California—it was one of the poorest counties in the state, Tehama County—most of the adults didn’t go to college. My adoptive father was a truck driver. My adoptive mother was an assistant social worker. Neither one of them went to college. They were married initially when they adopted me, but then they divorced.

Divorce was very common. Single parenthood. I had two friends in Red Bluff raised by single moms. A friend raised by a single dad.

Dr. Drew: Did you have anyone with parents together?

Rob Henderson: There was one friend I had very briefly in high school. He wasn’t a close friend in the group, but he hung out with us sometimes. This guy Antonio. And he had two married parents. But he was the only one that I knew, and he was not a close friend.

Dr. Drew: And for a minute it was good with the Hendersons. For a minute you thought, oh, I can breathe, I have relief. And then Dad leaves abruptly.

Rob Henderson: Yeah, it was abrupt.

Dr. Drew: And you already were having real issues with adults. Were you aware of it at that point, or were you numbed up so much that the abandonment didn’t really register?

Rob Henderson: The divorce didn’t register. I told the story of my parents splitting and what that was like. They had just adopted me, and then a little over a year later they separated. That wasn’t that difficult for me because I’d been through so many different changes by that point that this was just another one.

It was really hard on my sister, who was their biological daughter. She was not used to that kind of fragmentation and turmoil, so she took it a lot harder than I did.

What I did take hard, though, was—initially after the divorce, we did the whole “stay with Mom one week, stay with Dad” thing. But after a couple of months of this, my adopted father decided to stop speaking with me. His reasoning was—it was my mother who decided to leave him, and he was upset with her for doing that.

Dr. Drew: Punish you.

Rob Henderson: Yeah. My understanding is that even to this day, he is still not happy with what had happened.

Dr. Drew: Is he around still? Do you have any contact with him?

Rob Henderson: I went to my sister’s wedding a little over a year ago. She got married. Great husband. They’re happy.

Dr. Drew: Miracle. She went through some bad stuff too. Repeating the traumas. Did she have some treatment or something?

Rob Henderson: She had some therapy.

Dr. Drew: So those who are not psychologically oriented—when there's this kind of chaos and trauma in the primary caretakers, young adults act that out over and over and over again. They are attracted to, literally, the people and circumstances that are similar to those that were traumatizing in childhood.

Rob Henderson: I tell the story of one of the guys she dated. She had some—it took her, just like me, it took some time to sort of course correct. But when I was at the wedding—so yeah, her dad was there, my former adoptive father—and it was weird because I had just written this book, and I had all these memories swirling in my mind. Then I see him, and it was this moment of—I see him physically for the first time, and it might have been 15 years since the last time I saw him.

And now he's just a small old man. I'm taller than him. Time passes by, and just physically seeing him made me—I don't want to say forgive him, but I just felt like, oh, he's a flawed human being who probably went through a lot of his own issues himself. But that, as a kid, impacted me. Him leaving, my mom was working full-time, taking on extra hours, trying to make ends meet. And I was this latchkey kid.

It’s funny—a lot of people associate the latchkey kid phenomenon with Gen X, but this was happening with Millennials too. But I think it was just, there was this kind of class divide, where Millennials in the '90s and early 2000s—there were plenty of kids who would walk to and from school, unsupervised at home. Those were the kids being raised in single-parent families or in sort of alternate arrangements.

So I was unsupervised for long stretches of time and got into trouble and misadventures with a lot of the other young boys who were also not being overseen.

Dr. Drew: You make a point in the book about the lack of father figure and what attracts young males to these gangs—and it’s sort of how the military saved you.

Rob Henderson: There's this interesting divide among the universities and mainstream America, but then the military as well. One thing that occurred to me as someone who's been through both the military and the university system is that the higher education system claims to promote equality, social mobility, getting more people to climb up that ladder and climb upward. That's their stated aim.

But then they implicitly, and perhaps inadvertently, reverse it. The military is an explicit hierarchy, where you literally have stripes on your sleeve that determine where you fall in the actual pecking order of who listens to whom. So it's an explicit hierarchy, but it has been historically this engine for social mobility for young people—especially young men—historically, to climb out of difficult circumstances and to rise above them.

One of the points I make in the book is that because I had this completely unfettered freedom as a kid to just do whatever I wanted, it allowed me to make a lot of poor choices. But then in the military, it was such a suffocating environment that it forced me to make better choices and to have mentorship and camaraderie and good role models and those kinds of things.

The other point that I make in the book is that I learned through that process—I remember stepping off the bus, this was Lackland Air Force Base. I was 17 years old. The instructor immediately gets on the bus and starts shouting at us. I remember one instructor—there was a guy right next to him—he gets right in his face and says, “I don’t want you to think you’re doing me any favors.” He was like, “I could have all of you clowns out of here tomorrow and have these seats filled up again tomorrow.” This was before the recruitment shortfall, so he wasn’t lying. It was a different time.

I remember initially regretting it. Going from having complete freedom—being able to do whatever I wanted—and suddenly I’m being told what to do every minute of every day. From how you fold your clothes, to how you make your bed, how you wear your uniform.

It was actually aggravating for me as a teenage kid—17, 18 years old.

Dr. Drew: In the book, you say it was good for you, and you were aware of it.

Rob Henderson: Well, once I had developed enough and matured enough to recognize it. In that moment—I think I mentioned—I sort of summarized basic training in a page or two, because if I actually walked you through it step by step, you would get bored. It’s so mind-numbing how boring it is.

There’s physical training, those kinds of things—what everyone thinks about when they think of basic training in the military. But no one wants to read about how you precisely roll a T-shirt and make sure it’s 2 ¾ by 6 inches. This is mind-numbing stuff that they make you do. At the time I didn’t like it, but once I left and learned, oh, there was a purpose to this, there was a reason why they were putting us through these bizarre, mind-dumbing tasks—I grew to appreciate it.

And then later, I liked it. I saw this TikTok video recently of this probably 18- or 19-year-old kid. He was a new recruit in his barracks. He and all his friends were complaining about how much life sucked being the low man on the totem pole in the Army. I’m watching this video and I’m like, I know exactly how they feel. It’s a horrible feeling to be a young male in general. You don’t really have anything going for you, and now you’re being told what to do every minute of every day.

But I saw that and thought, five years from now, ten years from now, they're going to be happy that they made that choice.

Dr. Drew: We're jumping around a bit, but that did help you contain some of the problematic behaviors, which were profound. I mean, it’s hard for me to imagine you doing some of the things that you talk about doing. Really. I really robed that. And that all stopped—but the complex PTSD did not go away.

Rob Henderson: One thing I appreciate about you, Drew, is I’ve seen you talk about this book and other stories in different contexts. One of the things—when you were talking about Troubled on your podcast with some other guests—you said that you’re glad that this story is getting out there because people need to know how commonplace these stories are.

Because you understand how common this is. A lot of people don’t. A lot of people read a story like this—or other stories of people going through difficult circumstances—and think, oh, this is an anomaly. These are rare stories. But actually, they’re far more common than people think.

And that was the reason—one reason among others—why I wrote it. Because the segment of society who wields disproportionate political and cultural and economic influence—they are the ones who are the least likely to learn about these kinds of stories. But because of the work you did with Loveline and other platforms, you took calls like this every night. I remember being a teenager, listening to you, and feeling confused but also this sense of relief that there were other struggling kids out there too.

There were a couple of different influences on me that were positive. So one was Loveline at this time when I was in high school in the mid to late 2000s. And then the other one that I credit is my sister, because I think there were probably a couple of moments where I made plenty of bad decisions, but I could have made even worse ones. I did want to not disappoint her too much.

Dr. Drew: What came through to me in the book was that you always had the ability to work and were willing to work. And people noticed that and said, “Hey kid, you’ve got something here. Let me spend some time mentoring you.”

Rob Henderson: I just remember a lot of the high school students—it was actually considered cool to have a job and to make money and to have a car. It was very different, I think, from a lot of the way teenagers are today. But at that time, getting a job was recognized as something worthy of pursuing. Money and those kinds of things—I felt better about myself that I was doing something productive and that I was earning money as a result of it.

Whereas my impression toward school was so different. I think because of those early experiences in the foster homes—changing schools all the time, changing teachers, moving around so much.

Dr. Drew: The school thing was so classic, right? You're excelling, and then you have psychiatric symptoms. You're like, “No, screw it.” And no one pulls you aside and goes, “Hey kid, are you okay? Is anything going on? Can we adjust this? Can we work on this?” Right? Nobody assessed you?

Rob Henderson: Well, there was one. The final foster home. They thought that I might have had a learning disability because I was doing so poorly in school. So I took an IQ test. They sent a psychologist, and I scored below average overall. I scored way below average on the verbal section. It wasn’t because I wasn’t capable of doing the test. It was because no one read to me, and I barely knew the alphabet.

I was seven years old by this point, in second grade, and I couldn’t even read at a kindergarten level. That was why I scored so low on the verbal section. It was weird because I looked at the results of this test, and there were all these subcomponents. The quantitative math section I actually did pretty well on, but then the verbal section I did so poorly on. And it was a mess.

It was also in part because I felt maybe a little bit of this oppositional defiance thing, where the psychologist is asking me these questions, and I would purposely give wrong answers to some of the questions.

Dr. Drew: Is that when you started reading?

Rob Henderson: Reading also saved me. So hard work, mentorship, reading, intellect—those were all factors.

There were a couple of points I tried to make regarding that question, which I get a lot, which is: What allowed you to succeed despite everything you’d gone through?

There’s always that question of nature and nurture, genes and environment. I tried to make it clear early on that I was always this curious kid who was capable of doing well in school. But I just had all of this baggage weighing me down—all of these forces around me. And the point I try to make is that being academically inclined is maybe necessary, but not sufficient, to do well in school.

You can have a bright kid, but if they lived in the kind of foster care system that I lived in, or the kinds of families that I lived in, and witnessed the kinds of events that I did, you're still not going to do well in school, even if you have that raw ability there.

Which isn’t necessarily the same thing as saying every foster kid can go to Harvard or Yale or something. Those are different things. But I’m just saying, if you have a kid who has that potential, it still needs to be molded and sculpted. You still need to have role models. You still need to have some stability in place.

So I wrote the book in part highlighting the stories of a lot of my high school friends and how their lives turned out, to indicate to the reader that—you can read this story as a typical kind of bootstraps narrative of, “Oh, if you work hard, and with some talent and some luck and some mentorship and guidance, you can succeed.”

But I also wanted the reader to know that’s not the typical story of someone who grew up the way that I did. The typical outcome is what happened with my friends.

I had five close friends growing up. One friend, it was his little brother who was shot to death when we were in high school. He was a year behind us and tried to join a gang. The gang initiation was Russian Roulette, and he lost the game. He was 14 or 15 years old at that point.

And then two other friends served stints in prison at various times. I tell this story in the book—this was in 2020 or maybe 2021—I read this article in The New York Times, and it used this phrase: “We need to abandon this term ‘felon’ and instead use ‘justice-involved person.’” And I saw this, and I took a screenshot and sent it to my friend Tyler in the book, who had been to prison a couple of times.

Dr. Drew: He had been a justice-involved person.

Rob Henderson: He was a justice-involved person. I said to him, “Hey, good news—you’re not a felon anymore. You’re a justice-involved person.” And then he texts back to me something like, “Okay, Rob, you're not a college graduate anymore—you’re a classroom-involved person.”

And they’re still kind of around where we grew up.

Dr. Drew: There’s a lot more to be told. Read the book if you haven’t read the book. I’ve read it twice, and I enjoyed it maybe better the second time. It had a different flavor to it this time for me.

So Mom has a relationship, and they’re together. That’s a good time. Then Shelly gets shot in an accident, makes a killing with the insurance company, blows it all. Relationship falls apart. They buy houses, rent the houses. Real estate market goes to crap in California. They lose everything—the boat, the houses—all their stuff from the insurance deal.

Rob Henderson: Well, one point I try to make—I told that story for a lot of reasons. I mean, because that’s what happened, but also to communicate that money isn’t going to solve people’s problems. We received this massive financial windfall, and you can give people money, but you can’t immediately, overnight, inculcate wise financial decision-making or improvement in their overall life.

Dr. Drew: It actually—what, it’s what screwed up their relationship. It’s like lottery winners. The same kind of thing. That was kind of the heart, I think. What happened to me reading the book through that phase—it became more heartbreaking to me. The first time I was just with the chaos, like, “Oh my God, more chaos, tow up.” But then it became more of a heartbreaking story.

But let’s jump forward, since you’re talking about the justice-involved people and how people that you went to Yale with were perceiving and talking about essentially your life.

Rob Henderson: It was a strange period when I arrived. That was 2015, and it’s hard to believe that was nearly a decade ago. I arrived at roughly the time in the mid-2010s when all of this new wave of social justice, identity politics, political correctness was getting a foothold in elite institutions.

And I was completely—I was so far removed from all of that. These ongoing debates around free speech and the purpose of higher education. I just set foot on campus and I’m like, “Wow, I’m at Yale. These must be really smart people, and we must all be here for the same reason,” which is to get a good education.

And then I learned some people are there for that, but then others were there for other reasons. Within a matter of weeks, there was the Christakis incident. The Halloween costume controversy.

Dr. Drew: You chronicle this in the book in a way that I’d not really thought about before.

Rob Henderson: Well, part of it was because Nicholas Christakis read the early drafts of the manuscript and he filled in some of the details for me.

Dr. Drew: Tell it for those who don’t remember.

Rob Henderson: Very briefly—Halloween 2015, just a couple of weeks before the actual day, the Yale administration sends out this campus-wide email basically telling students, “Be careful with what you wear. Be sensitive. Be mindful. Don’t culturally appropriate.”

And I didn’t even know what that word meant when I read it. In response, Erika Christakis, who was a faculty member and an associate master—what they were calling associate master—of one of the residential colleges at Yale, wrote a response just to her students in this little residential college saying, “Do we really need more bureaucracy in our lives? You’re all adults. Do we really need the administration telling us what we’re allowed to wear on Halloween? You can handle it. Talk to each other if you have issues.”

Dr. Drew: She essentially said, “You’re adults. Make good decisions.”

Rob Henderson: Exactly. And I remember when that email went public. In response to that email, students—there was this uprising. There were famous viral videos online of students yelling at her husband, Nicholas Christakis, for defending her.

Which, in itself, I found—even at that time, I wasn’t as well versed in social justice politics as I am now. Not out of choice, but just because I’ve been around these people so long. Even then, I understood that there was something odd about a bunch of people saying, “How could you let your wife get out of pocket like that? You need to apologize on her behalf because she didn’t know what she was doing. But you’re a man.”

That was the kind of feeling I was getting from those interactions. Then the students called for her and her husband to be fired.

Dr. Drew: It was violent.

Rob Henderson: I remember seeing all of this occur and I would ask students, “What was so offensive about the email? Why are people so upset?” And there was one young female student who grew up in Greenwich, went to Exeter, which is an expensive private boarding school.

I told her, “I’m confused. I just don’t get why this...” and she responded, “Well, that’s because you’re too privileged to understand the pain that these professors had caused.”

And I’m in the safest, most gated, wealthiest institution I’d ever been in. I’m seeing the sons and daughters of millionaires saying that they feel unsafe, that they don’t feel comfortable in their beds at night.

There was this moment I really realized Yale was a different place. I was in Sterling Memorial Library—the main campus library at Yale—8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. I’m studying, a couple of weeks into my first semester. I have to use the restroom, so I get up. I’m closing my MacBook, which at that point was the most expensive thing I owned.

I’m about to put it in my backpack to go to the restroom, and I look around. I see a slew of other laptops that have been abandoned, just left on the tables. Students wandering around, leaving their belongings completely unmonitored. And then I realized, oh—no one steals anything here. These are all a bunch of rich kids. No one’s stealing each other’s MacBooks at a place like this.

And that was the first time I’d ever been in an environment where I didn’t have to worry about my belongings being stolen. So to go from that to these students talking about how unsafe they felt was just very bizarre.

Dr. Drew: And how privileged you are.

Rob Henderson: Yeah. I was the privileged one.

Dr. Drew: Did you push back on that? Could you?

Rob Henderson: At that moment, I was so stunned that I had nothing to say.

Dr. Drew: So—there’s a lot more that we could—Rob and I get together, it goes for a while. There’s a lot more we could talk about, we could fill in. Again, I’m just enamored by this book.

Rob Henderson: You’ve been speaking with young people for decades now—I mean, you started Loveline in the ‘80s?

Dr. Drew: Yeah.

Rob Henderson: What have you noticed among young people? Has anything shifted since the ‘80s to the present?

Dr. Drew: I was aware that the ‘60s and ‘70s had a really bad effect on families and on children in particular. The sexual revolution—people were around in the ‘70s—included people acting out on children and just going, “They’re just sexual beings. They’re just little adults. No big deal.” It was horrible.

Look at the lyrics of some of the rock songs from the ‘70s. Somebody just posted on Twitter yesterday—the Led Zeppelin album with the little girls naked, walking around on the front. The title of the tweet was, “Why didn’t somebody question this?”

There were a lot of things going on. In any event, PTSD, trauma, destroyed families—stuff you were dealing with was really manifesting in the ‘80s and ‘90s in people’s behaviors: substance abuse, complex PTSD. And then it came around again in the 2000s.

Now they’re reenacting the trauma, making bad choices, unwilling to get married because “marriage is just a piece of paper.” And I’m thinking, “What contract is not just a piece of paper?” All contracts are pieces of paper. But they were so traumatized by the ruptures of their family systems that they didn’t want to give it another chance. They just closed down, numbed up, wouldn’t even have relationships many times—or if they did, they were traumatic reenactments.

The thing I saw—there was still a hunger for information. Well into the 2000s, maybe the 2010–2015 era, people still wanted to know what was up. Why were they behaving the way they did? Where could they get help?

Then the internet made it so that they felt like they had all the answers. The first thing that happened was they didn’t need adults anymore because it was all there to be searched. They were full of wisdom—or rather, they were full of information, but they didn’t understand the difference between wisdom and information.

This got very confusing, where they felt they were completely empowered, completely knowledgeable—and they were making the same damn mistakes as everybody else.

Something very specific started happening, where you couldn’t go to colleges and give a talk without getting attacked. I remember I went to a high school and gave a talk—this was around 2014. It was a talk about addiction. I was giving an expert discussion on addiction and how it works.

And the school psychologist pulled me aside and said, “Yeah, I need you to know, the kids think you’re too authoritative.”

I thought, “You brought me in here as an authority. If I’m not an authority on addiction, what am I?” I just gave a basic lecture on addiction.

“Well, you just need to know, they were troubled. They didn’t feel safe.”

So I saw it coming. And I just thought, there’s a big problem coming.

And I’m not going to be able to solve it, and they don’t want to hear from me, so I’ll just stop.

Rob Henderson: What year was that? Around the time where you noticed the shift on college campuses?

Dr. Drew: Probably in the late—2005 to 2010—when it really got going. Then it became you couldn’t go. Comedians stopped going. Everybody stopped going. I remember reading that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock refused to play college campuses.

Rob Henderson: Yeah, because for this very reason—that students had become very hypersensitive. I wonder if we’ll see a shift now. People talk about the vibe shift, the cultural shift. Things aren’t quite as crazy as they were.

Dr. Drew: No, they don’t. But it still feels dangerous to go on college campuses. Maybe a younger person who understands exactly what they need or something can come in there and do something. But I’ve spoken on a few college campuses.

[...]

Audience Member: First of all, thank you both for being here today. I had a question, kind of more concerned with the book but potentially applicable to both of you. You’ve argued that luxury beliefs let the upper classes signal altruism and other virtues and set themselves apart from the lower classes, who can perhaps directly see how some of these particular manifestations of that can be harmful. But if most of these people are actually quite sincere, as they appear to be—if not fanatical, as they often appear to be—how exactly is it that status or status-seeking is what causes them to adopt these views? And maybe also my data question: Why do we really believe what we believe if it’s not just a process of rational deliberation and evaluation of all the facts? Which obviously, right, is not the case. Yet we still sometimes come to hold these passionate beliefs. I’m curious as to what you see as the mechanisms by which people come to hold these beliefs that confer status upon them.

Rob Henderson: There are a couple of different mechanisms. Luxury beliefs, very briefly—I’m sure some of you know—I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society. A core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief.

Dr. Drew: The two classics for me are: defund the police, and marriage isn’t important.

Rob Henderson: So how does it start? There are different ways. A lot of these luxury beliefs are born in elite institutions, elite universities. It spreads through legacy media outlets. Defund the police is a classic case. At no point, even at the height of the defund the police movement, was a majority of Americans in favor of it. And yet it acquired a lot of cultural cachet among certain segments of elites.

There were cities in America that reduced funding for law enforcement. Even in cities that didn’t actually defund their police, it cultivated this general attitude of anti-police sentiment, and police became less willing to do their jobs. There was a story out of San Francisco I saw—police were chasing a suspect and some bystanders interfered and tried to stop the police. In the old days, if police were chasing a suspect, bystanders might help the cops. Now they’re helping the criminals. There’s been an interesting shift there.

I sometimes only half-jokingly say: remember that book In Defense of Looting from 2020? It got some press in NPR and The Atlantic. The most cynical part of me thinks that was basically an audition to introduce a new luxury belief into legacy media. Even elites were horrified by that one, and they walked it back and memory-holed it. But this is how it works: it starts with elite academics, spreads through journalism, becomes the prevailing sentiment. Sometimes there’s backlash. Fashions change over time.

As for how people acquire beliefs—that would be a very long discussion. There are aspects of personality involved, childhood experiences.

You talked, Drew, about how you break things down into categories—like the ideological fanatics and then the people who kind of passively go along.

Dr. Drew: This is the Matthias Desmet theory about mass formation. I’ve studied a lot about mobs and true believers, especially during COVID. I was like, what just happened? It turns out it’s right there in history, over and over again. It almost always takes the same form: 20% are persuaded immediately—they’re hypnotized, they become true believers, fanatics. They cancel people who disagree. They’re all in.

10% raise their hand and say, "This is BS. Something’s wrong here."

The other 70% just want to be left alone. They want to live and take care of their family.

Rob Henderson: They just want to grill.

Dr. Drew: They just want to be left alone. It’s that 20% we have to worry about. I’ve met many of them. All of them insist they would have fought off some of the hysteria of 1939 Germany, when in fact they would have been the prison guards. That’s the craziness of all this.

Be part of that 10%. Be prepared to say, "Excuse me, this doesn’t feel right to me."

[...]

Rob Henderson: Peter Turchin’s idea of intra-elite competition helps to explain what’s going on in higher education. You have this glut of DEI officers who need to create jobs for themselves. They appoint themselves as DEI officers and end up making as much or more than some professors—and wield more power in a lot of ways.

I remember I had this conversation with a professor at Yale who was fully tenured, had an endowed chair, and he privately said something like, “There are two groups historically that Yale has been responsive to: the tenured professors, and the undergrads.” Basically saying that grad students—no one cares, no one listens to them.

But increasingly, he said, it seems like the administration wields the most power. The kind of administrative staff—what they say prevails more and more.

Audience Member: This question is for Rob. Would you send your own kid, or would you encourage them to? I'm just curious how you think about the tradeoffs between sending your kid to an elite, prestigious institution and the risk of them absorbing some of these luxury beliefs.

Rob Henderson: I wouldn’t encourage or discourage. I think if he or she decides they want to go there, I'll let them know what my experience was. We could visit the campus together and get a sense of what the—hopefully by that point—things will have shifted. We'll see how the education system changes.

I don't donate. I just had lunch the other day with a friend of mine who's a Yale alum, and we both kind of talked about how we have this ideal of Yale—“Mother Yale,” this place of learning and education and this rich history. But then what Yale actually is, is just so different than what I expected. That disillusionment will never completely vanish.

But yeah, I wouldn't encourage or discourage. I would just allow them to make their choices and be as informed as they could possibly be. There's still plenty of issues with higher education. Some people say there's a vibe shift, that wokeness peaked. My understanding is—and I have a lot of friends in academia—it’s as bad or worse than ever in the universities. You're seeing it now with the encampments and protests. It's still as if it had never changed—still like 2016 on campus.

Audience Member: I appreciate you all being here. Thank you. Just curious—you didn't mention religion or God. Is there a thread in your life about God?

Rob Henderson: There were a couple of brief asides in the book. Shortly after I was adopted, we went to church. My adoptive parents were Seventh-day Adventists when they adopted me, but then after they divorced, they stopped going to church. This is very common. If you look at religious attendance, married couples are more likely to attend religious services than single parents. Fragmented family structures—we were a data point for that. So we stopped going. Religion was never a big part of my life.

But I remember receiving emails from readers—Christian readers. They usually had two comments. One was they were surprised and delighted to see that I'd mentioned Christianity in my book. And they were also surprised that I didn't say anything negative about it. They thanked me for that. They said, “Thank you for not bashing on Christianity in your book,” because I guess in a lot of cases, whenever Christianity is mentioned, it's only in a derogatory sense. I didn't have anything negative to say about “these backwards religious people” and that I just needed to go to Yale and become enlightened or something. That was not the story. And I think they were worried that that's what it would be.

Audience Member: Thank you so much, Rob, for being here—and also for moving to New York as a fellow Californian. I have a personal question for you, and it relates to what you mentioned in the book about feeling, in your earlier stages in life, the lack of love and a stable support system and believing in who you are. I'm just wondering, even in your life today, if some of the potentially more negative and destructive thought patterns might affect your interpersonal relationships now—and how you’ve found, through your own experiences, how to acknowledge and manage them today?

Rob Henderson: Not so much. I think one reason why I was even able to write this book in the first place was because I—for the most part—I’ve processed it and worked through it. The book was harder to write than I expected, and I did feel a lot of those feelings come up again as I was going through it.

In the book, I describe how it did affect relationships—how I felt about myself and about other people, and how it was difficult for me to form attachments. Actually, this is something I’m guilty of sometimes—where I can go weeks without contacting anyone in my family and not really think about it. I'll get so caught up in work or whatever, and then my sister will text me and say, “Hey, you need to call Mom, she’s asking what’s going on with you.” And I'm like, “Oh yeah, it's been two months since I called.”

I have to get on myself about that. I've noticed that's kind of a difference between me and my sister—and probably me and most other people who have good relationships with their parents or family. For them, it's just a feeling of, “Oh, I should call because I should call.” But for me, it's a conscious, deliberate process. It's not a feeling. It’s more cognitive and rational—“This is what a good son would do, I’ve got to do this.” That’s maybe a lingering effect.

Dr. Drew: You've had a fair bit of treatment too.

Rob Henderson: Oh, yeah. I talked about that in the book. That was one of the harder chapters to write—the rehab chapter, therapy, and all of that. It helped enormously.

Dr. Drew: It sounded like you were forming open attachments—inter-subjective relationships that were somewhat tight—with some of the staff, some of the therapists. Did you also with recovering peers? You didn’t mention that in the book. Did those sorts of relationships form?

Rob Henderson: Yeah. I had some of those stories in early drafts of the manuscript—interacting with other patients in the treatment facility. Those ended up getting cut during editing. Maybe I’ll post those on Substack or something sometime.

Dr. Drew: If you had not had those attachments, there’d be big trouble right now. You would have trouble—not just intimacy, but sustaining relationships.

Rob Henderson: My difficulty was mostly toward authority figures—teachers, parents, bosses. I was able to manage it when I needed to and contain it. I never really had difficulty with making friends.

Dr. Drew: You tell the story about a relationship that you just kind of tossed away.

Rob Henderson: Yeah. Romantic relationships were a little more thorny. Friendships were fine. But yeah, I tell the story of that relationship. It was very much just—this attitude that’s also commonplace now—everyone's replaceable and transactional.

Dr. Drew: Yeah. Transactional and just “enjoy it while it lasts”—the opposite of intimacy.

Rob Henderson: Right.

Audience Member: You talked a little bit about how people acquire luxury beliefs—colleges, institutions—but their actions don’t really impact life. I'm really curious—how do people sustain that when they’ve seen far more in life? Like, for example, the editorial board of Nature magazine, American Science, American Medical Association. How do the 10%—the hypnotized fanatics—so convincingly place some beliefs that we all find strange? It seems like cowardice, but I’m curious what you think.

Dr. Drew: So, make sure I understand. The question is: How do they maintain these things when they go out in the world and the evidence is so contrary?

Audience Member: A lot of them are insulated from those experiences by being on editorial boards and staying in ivory towers. Then they have a group that they’re indoctrinating all the time. The further the kids move away from those institutions, the less likely they are to maintain those luxury beliefs—when they start seeing the evidence.

Rob Henderson: Yeah. I was thinking—just very quickly—my thought here was cowardice. Because they personally don't believe it, but it is the fashionable belief, or someone pressured them to go with it. Then they print it and don’t challenge it, even if they know it's wrong.

Dr. Drew: Maybe one more question?

Audience Member: Hey Rob, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your journey from getting out of the Air Force and getting into psychology. What was your thought process?

Rob Henderson: Air Force to psychology. Very briefly, I told the story in the book. My final year, I read a book by Steven Pinker—How the Mind Works. I read his other books, read a bunch of other psychology books. In the meantime, YouTube was big then—not as big as it is now—but that was a lot of lectures I was watching online. iTunes U. I was listening to Dr. Drew, and I thought, “Okay, this seems like an interesting area to explore,” and just decided to study it in a formal way. But reading was a very important driver of all that.

Dr. Drew: At Yale, you weren’t really at first doing psychology, right?

Rob Henderson: No, I was. I was doing psychology from the start. I knew I wanted to go to grad school in some capacity. So I had my sights set on grad school and as much education as possible.

Dr. Drew: How did you go into social psychology and not clinical?

Rob Henderson: It was the reverse. Initially, I thought the clinical route seemed intriguing. Then, once I learned more about evolutionary and social and other branches of psychology, I tilted in that direction.

Dr. Drew: How is evolutionary psychology doing these days? It was the sine qua non when I was in training. Why do certain behavioral neurobiological pressures take hold? Look at the evolutionary advantages in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Then it became: You cannot say that. You cannot talk about evolutionary psychology. Where is it now?

Rob Henderson: Well, it’s interesting. Evolution in general is such an unpopular idea on both sides of the political aisle. The right used to be very against it because of religious reasons. The left is against it because it reveals that there are differences between men and women. There are individual differences, group differences—and they don’t like that either. So it's always going to be besieged on all sides.

I think it's doing okay. You’ll still see evolutionary psychology studies published in top psychology journals. But my understanding is, behind the scenes, there’s an ongoing agitation and battle. I mentioned this friend of mine—he went to Yale, now he's a professor at a different institution. He was telling me it’s increasingly difficult for him to get funding for his studies. I asked why, and he said it’s because it opposes blank-slate ideology. Evolutionary psychology is unpopular among people who think that if you just tweak the dials of society the right way, we can equalize all outcomes.

So it’s still alive. I wouldn’t say it’s on life support, but it's struggling to sustain itself.

Dr. Drew: I think we’re getting the hook.

All right. Well, listen—I could sit and talk to you all day long. I'm so appreciative that you're in my life. However we found our way together, I’m so glad that we did. I think Loveline sort of brought us together—we didn’t get into that story.

I appreciate you writing this book. I appreciate you asking me to be a part of this evening. We appreciate you all for being here. We're both going to stick around and answer questions.

Rob Henderson: Yeah, yeah. We’ll hang. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll just end the formal part of the program now. Thank you Dr. Drew.

Dr. Drew: And thank you.