Rob Henderson
@robkhenderson • 223,642 subscribers
Best-selling author of "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class" | Senior Fellow, @ManhattanInst | All Views My Own
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A fascinating finding: When asked about kids in America, conservatives say they are more worried about boys; liberals are more worried about girls. But when asked about their own children, parents on both the left and right are more worried about their sons than their daughters.
Rob Henderson276,580 views • 16 days ago
You keep saying you don’t have time, he did all this in 27 seconds.
Rob Henderson11,007,827 views • 1 year ago
The safest way to be liked: Make your victories look smaller and your suffering look larger. This is an important piece of wisdom from the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith: If others people's joys are too great, we feel envy. If others' sorrows are too small, we don't take them seriously. Thus, we are prone to sympathize with other people's small joys and great sorrows.
Rob Henderson49,442 views • 6 days ago
Sometimes failure feels safer than success. Masochism, at least in its milder form as self-defeating behavior, is an overlooked barrier to upward mobility. Some people have both the ability and the opportunity to succeed, yet hold themselves back because they do not believe they deserve success. I know young people who are clearly talented and academically gifted but refuse to apply to universities for which they are well qualified. They do not want to leave home, and they worry that their friends will think they consider themselves superior. This resembles imposter syndrome, but it is also a form of self-sabotage. On some level, they feel that success is not meant for them. This is not a problem that public policy or economic redistribution can easily solve. It is a deep psychological barrier that requires difficult inner work to overcome. On the Open Therapy Institute podcast
Rob Henderson29,820 views • 5 days ago
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The manosphere’s most effective recruiting tool is the discovery that adults did not tell boys the whole truth about women. One reason young guys are drawn to the manosphere is that some of the information they find there is not really offered anywhere else. And some of it is directionally accurate. One thing these guys will say is that women are trained from a young age to be aware of what men can be like. "Men only want one thing, you have to be careful around guys, etc." And so, once girls hit puberty, they have this ambient awareness that men have certain motives and that they should keep their guard up. Boys, by contrast, are not always told the complete truth about what women can be like. They grow up thinking women are like Disney princesses who want nothing but kindness and generosity and empathy. Then a boy enters high school and sees the kinds of guys many girls are actually drawn to. Often it is not the super nice guy. Sometimes it's the bully, or the jock, or the guy who seems dominant and socially confident. If you are not prepared for that, and you are a naive teenage boy, the realization can send you in a very dark direction. You start thinking, “I have been lied to about women my whole life. What else have I been lied to about?” And from there, it is easy to conclude that there is an entire matrix of hidden truths you now need to see through and only the online influencers will show you the way.
Rob Henderson209,631 views • 1 month ago
Muscularity is a huge predictor of romantic appeal. One study of more than 7,000 men found that muscle mass was associated with more sexual partners in the last year and more sexual partners overall. A study on males aged 18 to 59 found that muscularity is significantly positively associated with the number of total sexual partners and total partners within the past year. Handgrip strength is correlated with self-assessed happiness, health, social confidence, overall physical attractiveness, and overall number of sexual partners. To me, the most interesting finding in this line of work is that how tough a guy looks to men appears to be a much stronger predictor of mating success than how attractive he is to women. Researchers recorded short videos of 157 different men. Next, another group of men watched these videos. Researchers asked them a question about each of the men in the videos: “How likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man?” They used a scale ranging from “extremely likely” to “extremely unlikely.” A group of women also viewed the videos. They responded to a question about each of the men: “How sexually attractive is this man?” They used a scale ranging from “extremely unattractive” to “extremely attractive.” Eighteen months later, the men in the videos completed a questionnaire asking about their sexual history over the 18 months. How tough a guy looked to men predicted his reported mating success better than how attractive he looked to women. The researchers concluded, “Men with higher physical dominance, but not sexual attractiveness, reported higher quantitative mating success.”
Rob Henderson198,941 views • 1 month ago
Self-help books for women vs. men aren’t selling the same story. If you walk through the self-help section and compare the books marketed to men with those aimed at women, the contrast is striking. The books for men tend to emphasize stoicism, discipline, and self-sufficiency: become more focused, toughen up, don’t let the world knock you off your path, no one is coming to save you. The message is essentially that you need to strengthen yourself and earn your way forward. The books for women, by contrast, rarely begin with the idea that you’re lacking something that needs to be built. Instead, the theme is closer to: you’re already great, but you keep getting in your own way. The world hasn’t recognized your value because you haven’t fully accepted it yourself. The promise is that once you stop beating yourself up and embrace who you already are, others will see it too. Two very different messages—one built around improvement, the other around affirmation.
Rob Henderson911,243 views • 8 months ago
The farther I traveled from poverty, the more fashionable it became to romanticize the conditions I had escaped. I grew up in poverty in Los Angeles and was taken from my mother when I was three. She had immigrated from South Korea, but her life unraveled amid drug addiction. I never met my father and learned only as an adult, through a genetic ancestry test, that he was Mexican. I spent the next several years moving through foster homes and chaotic circumstances. At seventeen, I enlisted in the United States Air Force. After some setbacks, I arrived at Yale at twenty-five and studied on the GI Bill. Along the way, I climbed nearly every rung of the American class ladder. I moved from poverty through working-class and lower-middle-class homes. In the military, I encountered the middle class. At Yale, I was surrounded by the upper-middle class and the wealthy. Moving through these worlds, I noticed that beliefs changed with social class. At Yale, I heard ideas I had never encountered before: abolish the police, empty the prisons, promote polyamory, dismantle traditional marriage, and decriminalize drugs. These ideas were popular among elites, but their costs often fell on communities like the ones where I grew up. I had seen addiction, abuse, neglect, abandonment, and disorder up close. At Yale and later during my Ph.D. at Cambridge, I studied research on class and social status. It helped me understand what I had witnessed and led me to some startling statistics about social class.
Rob Henderson110,622 views • 1 month ago
In high school, you get 155 hours on Hitler, 3 minutes on Stalin, and nothing on Pol Pot. Nothing on Mao. Barely a mention of Fidel Castro. It's striking that we don’t learn about Mao or Pol Pot—despite the scale of their crimes. Mao killed more people than any dictator in history. Estimates range from 40 to 80 million deaths. Just between the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, one to two million were killed. And yet we were taught nothing. Pol Pot is another example. He killed about a quarter to a third of Cambodia’s population—roughly two million people—in just four years. And again, silence. Maybe some of you went to better schools than I did, but most people I talk to say they didn’t learn anything about Mao or Pol Pot either. As a kid, we read The Diary of Anne Frank. In high school, it was Schindler’s List or The Pianist on slow Fridays. I wasn’t even a great student, but I still remember all the lessons, books, and discussions about Hitler and the Nazis. You grow up knowing the worst thing you can be called is Hitler or a Nazi. And that’s fine—we should study Hitler. But we could also make room for the other brutal dictators, especially the ones on the far left. For some reason, that's barely mentioned.
Rob Henderson1,213,167 views • 1 year ago
Gay male couples—two men in a relationship—have the lowest breakup rates, which is striking given that gay men also have the highest rates of what evolutionary psychologists call extra-dyadic mating, a technical term for sex outside the primary relationship: infidelity, or cheating. In other words, they have the lowest breakup rates despite the highest levels of non-monogamous behavior. After gay male couples, heterosexual couples—one man and one woman—have the next lowest breakup rates. Interestingly, the highest breakup rates are found among female–female couples. Lesbian couples, on average, dissolve relationships more frequently than either gay male or heterosexual couples. One likely reason is that, across relationship types, women are more likely than men to initiate breakups. In heterosexual marriages, women initiate 60 to 70 percent of divorces. When you have two women in a relationship, you effectively double the likelihood that at least one partner will initiate a breakup, which raises the overall probability of relationship dissolution.
Rob Henderson591,197 views • 8 months ago
How do luxury beliefs spread to the general public? Imagine that tomorrow, the people who shape culture decide that littering is no longer a big deal. The opinion pages of major newspapers start running essays arguing that concerns about litter are overblown. Glossy magazines publish longform pieces suggesting that cleanliness norms are socially constructed, maybe even a little oppressive. The hot new series on your favorite streaming platform depicts attractive and interesting characters tossing trash on the ground without a second thought. Academics, journalists, politicians, CEOs, and influencers all start saying some version of the same thing: littering is not a serious issue. And if you criticize someone for doing it, you are the problem. You are being judgmental. You are enforcing outdated norms. You need to let people live. Perhaps some new legislation is passed that decriminalizes littering. Over time the message becomes clear. Throwing trash wherever you want is acceptable. It is normalized. It is actively defended. Now let me ask you something. Would anyone be surprised, 5 or 10 years later, if garbage started piling up? Would anyone be surprised if that problem was not evenly distributed? If it showed up most in lower-income neighborhoods while affluent areas remained relatively pristine? That’s the pattern. The people who promote the luxury belief are insulated from its consequences.
Rob Henderson149,662 views • 2 months ago
If you want to know which men have the most success with women, you might be better off ignoring women and asking men instead. Researchers recorded videos of 157 different men. Next, a different group of men watched these videos and responded to a question about each of the men in the videos: “How likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man?” They used a scale ranging from “extremely likely” to “extremely unlikely.” A group of women also viewed the videos and responded to a question about each of the men: “How sexually attractive is this man?” They used a scale ranging from “extremely unattractive” to “extremely attractive.” Eighteen months later, the men in the videos completed a questionnaire asking about their sexual history over the 18 months. The shocking result: how tough a guy looked to men predicted his mating success better than how attractive he looked to women. The researchers concluded, “Men with higher physical dominance, but not sexual attractiveness, reported higher quantitative mating success.” Reference: Kordsmeyer, T. L., Hunt, J., Puts, D. A., Ostner, J., & Penke, L. (2018). The relative importance of intra-and intersexual selection on human male sexually dimorphic traits. Evolution and Human Behavior, 39, 424-436.
Rob Henderson116,749 views • 2 months ago
Interesting to see a liberal and a conservative both agree that liberals have destroyed the family Bill Maher: I know you think liberals want to destroy the family. David Mamet: No, no. I don't think they want to destroy the family. I think they have destroyed the family. Bill Maher: But they didn't really do it on purpose. David Mamet: Wait a second. What you're saying is I didn't know it was loaded, right? Bill Maher: Yes. Okay. But liberals actually think they're doing good. I know a lot of times it's really just about making them feel good, which is what's so obnoxious. But they're not actually trying to destroy... David Mamet: We understand as dramatists is that nobody ever did something for a bad reason.
Rob Henderson534,318 views • 1 year ago
The people most committed to communism in the Soviet Union weren’t the workers—it was the educated elite. A retrospective study conducted in the 1990s titled "Work Ethics and the Collapse of the Soviet System," examined which groups were most supportive of the Soviet system. The researchers found that, compared to factory workers and semi-skilled laborers, individuals in white-collar positions—especially those with higher levels of education—were significantly more likely to express loyalty to the Communist Party. In some cases, support was two to three times higher among elites. In other words, the strongest support for the system came not from those at the bottom, but from those in relatively advantaged positions within it. This runs counter to the common assumption that egalitarian or redistributive ideologies are primarily driven by the least well-off. In practice, they are often most strongly endorsed by people closer to the top of the social hierarchy—those who benefit from the system’s institutional structure, or who are positioned to navigate it successfully.
Rob Henderson239,024 views • 5 months ago
