How Privileged Thinking Drives Our Entire Culture - Rob Henderson - #748

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rob Henderson. He's a PhD graduate from the University of Cambridge, a US Air Force veteran and an author. The people who make the rules are not the ones impacted by the rules. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower class. And they're everywhere. Expect to learn Rob's opinion on the recent catastrophes in American higher education, why luxury beliefs have become more common than ever before, what Rob learned during his journey through all class levels, what it's like to truly be in poverty, Rob's advice for how people can become better readers and much more. Rob happens to be one of the smartest people on the internet. I love his Twitter. I love his sub stack. He's always deep in the research, finding cool stuff about social psychology or human nature or anthropology or evolution or whatever. And he's brilliant. And I will continue to bring him on the show until the sun engulfs the earth because I like him and I hope that you do too. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've won Whoop for over four years now since way before they were a partner on the show. And it is the only wearable I have ever stuck with because it's the best. It is so innocuous. You do not remember that you've got it on. And yet it tracks absolutely everything 24 seven via something from your wrist. It tracks your heart rate. It tracks your sleep, your recovery, all of your workouts, your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, how much you're breathing throughout the night. It puts all of this into an app and spits out very simple, easy to understand and fantastically usable data. It's phenomenal. I am a massive, massive fan of Whoop. And that is why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. You can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4 strap. Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. And if you do not like it after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Head to join.whoop.com/modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com/modernwisdom.
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What do you make of the last few months of fallout from Yale and Harvard and such?

**Rob Henderson** (4:24)
I mean, yeah, we saw that big testimonial from the presidents. Yeah, it was Harvard, MIT, Penn. I mean, I wasn't surprised by it. I mean, a lot of people, I think, are finally fully realizing they're coming to their senses. People have been saying this for a while now. Oh, you know, eventually the pendulum will swing back and people will finally figure out what's really going on in these institutions and this sort of ideology that's been spilling out of the universities and now I think they finally are actually truly realizing it. But yeah, I saw the kind of the birth of what a lot of people call wokeness in 2015 when I arrived on campus at Yale. And it was my first semester. I saw what was happening there. And yeah, I mean, I think you can draw a straight line from some of those events in 2015 to what we're seeing now. And yeah, it's been really ugly, but kind of amusing from my perspective, because I'd like to think that I was one of the sort of early observers and people who could recognize what was occurring. And then later on, so Jordan Peterson was another, and there have been other critics of higher ed, and especially these elite universities. But yeah, it's been really, really amusing and also sort of disheartening to see it.