Rob Henderson
@robkhenderson • 206,300 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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You keep saying you don’t have time, he did all this in 27 seconds.
Rob Henderson11,000,072 views • 1 year 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 • 5 months ago
Luxury beliefs are costly to attain. It’s true that in 2020 anyone on the street could have said, “Defund the police.” But you don’t automatically acquire status simply by repeating the slogan. You have to say it in a way that communicates your level of education, upbringing, and cultural capital. It’s similar to knowing a lot about wine. You might be able to fool someone momentarily by mentioning a particular vintage. But if I ask why you like that wine, you need to be able to elaborate in a certain way. The same is true of luxury beliefs. You can’t just say, “Defund the police.” If I ask why, you have to talk about interlocking systems of oppression, violence interrupters, the history of abolition and slavery, and so on. You have to be able to communicate the belief in a specific language. The only way to do that is by passing through certain institutions, having certain kinds of jobs, and being immersed in particular social environments. There is certainly a group-membership signaling component here. But the audience is primarily affluent, college-educated, credentialed people. Those are the people these signals are meant for.
Rob Henderson15,375 views • 3 days ago
One possible effect of MeToo is that now you see plenty of perfectly normal guys who are genuinely afraid of being accused of something—harassment, coercion, intimidation, whatever it may be. I think people misunderstood what young men are actually like and overinterpreted the problem. Yes, there’s always some small percentage of genuine predators out there—people who are basically immune to laws, shame, or stigma. They’re going to be predators no matter what barriers you put in front of them. But the average guy is not like that. The average young guy, when he’s repeatedly told about toxic masculinity, that men are the problem, “the future is female,” and that he constantly needs to prove he respects women, starts to internalize something different. He thinks, I should just hang back. I shouldn’t do anything. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. So he ends up walking on eggshells. When I think back to high school, the average guy already needed basically every condition to be perfect just to make a move. In some ways, it’s amazing anyone ever pairs up at all. I think about my best friend in high school—I lived with him our senior year. He had a crush on this girl in our class for ages. She liked him too; we knew from her friends. It was the classic setup where everyone knew, everyone was talking, and everyone was rooting for them. His friends told her friends. Her friends told him. I told my friend. The entire social machinery was working overtime to make this happen. And still, it felt impossible. Finally, he walks up to her, and I’m standing maybe ten feet away pretending not to listen. He says, “Hey, our friends have been talking, and I guess I should tell you I like you…” He was terrified. He even said, “I can’t believe how hard this is for me.” She was encouraging him: “It’s okay. You can ask.” He says, “I want to ask you something.” She says, “It’s okay. You can ask.” And he says, “I don’t know if I can.” That’s your typical 17-year-old boy. All the nerves, all the emotional energy, all the fear of asking a girl out for the first time. Finally, after all of that, he asks: “Will you go out with me?” She says yes. This is with mutual attraction, friend approval, social permission—basically a green light from the universe. And he was still terrified. Now imagine that same boy growing up hearing over and over: don’t bother women, leave them alone, don’t approach, don’t be creepy, don’t be a toxic male. At some point, the average guy doesn’t become more respectful—he just becomes more passive.
Rob Henderson84,200 views • 19 days 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 Henderson1,212,905 views • 10 months 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 Henderson238,297 views • 2 months ago
What actually changed my life was learning to do things I hated every single day. Some people read the early chapters of Troubled and say, “I can’t recognize this person. How does the teenage kid I’m reading about become the person I’m speaking to now?” The answer is simple: if you spend eight years in the military, you’re going to change. And it took all eight of those years for me to reshape my personality, my outlook, and my priorities to the point where I could function as a self-sufficient adult. I initially enlisted for four years. One of the most important lessons I learned during that time was that motivation is overrated. It took me a long time to understand this, but motivation is just a feeling. Do I want to do this? Do I not want to do this? Do I feel inspired today? Self-discipline matters more than motivation. Self-discipline means doing what needs to be done regardless of how you feel. It means sticking to healthy routines and making good decisions even when you don’t feel motivated. If you can string together enough productive days over a long enough period of time, your life will begin to improve. What’s happening internally, in terms of motivation or lack of motivation, matters less than people think. The real question is: can you do it anyway? At first, that discipline was imposed from the outside. In basic training, the instructors enforce structure and routine. But over time, that external discipline gradually becomes internal self-discipline. Even after my first four years in the Air Force, from ages seventeen to twenty-one, I knew I still wasn’t ready to leave that rigid structure behind. I understood that I needed more time inside an environment that demanded responsibility and consistency from me. So I reenlisted for another four years. By the time I was twenty-four or twenty-five, I was finally prepared.
Rob Henderson23,266 views • 6 days 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 Henderson589,229 views • 5 months ago
Times have changed. Some point between Millennial and Gen Z as depicted in 21 Jump Street (2012).
Rob Henderson228,491 views • 2 months ago
Among men who use the dating app Hinge, 10 percent of male users receive 60 percent of the "likes." If you look at Tinder, there was a 2019 study showing that men swiped right on about 60% of female profiles. In other words, most men were willing to like the majority of women they saw. Women, by contrast, swiped right on only about 4% of male profiles. That lines up with what we see in everyday life. Men are generally more open to casual sex and less selective at the outset, while women tend to be more selective and more cautious. For many single men, the default mindset is something like: I would probably sleep with her unless there is some reason not to. For many women, it is the reverse: I probably would not sleep with him unless there is some particular reason why I should. Men tend to look for green flags. Women tend to scrutinize for red flags. I remember a conversation in graduate school with a female friend that made this especially clear. She worked at a café, and there was a guy who came in every day for coffee. They would chat a little each time, and she told me, “I’m just waiting for him to ask me out.” I said, “Why don’t you just ask him out?” She looked at me like I was insane. She said, “Are you crazy? No matter how much I liked a guy, I would never ask him out.” At the time, I laughed and thought, fine, fair enough. But later I realized how revealing that was. You would almost never hear a man say the equivalent: “There’s this woman I see every day, I really like her, but no matter how much I liked her, I would never ask her out.” If a man said that, the obvious response would be: then you’re probably going to be single forever.
Rob Henderson85,118 views • 1 month ago
Negative social judgments are not always cruel. Sometimes they are guardrails. Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is tell the truth about which choices lead to suffering and which ones do not. Single parenthood is harder. Substance abuse is destructive. Crime corrodes communities. Pretending otherwise, wrapping these realities in a language of non-judgment and normalization, is not kindness. It is a luxury. It’s what you believe when you are insulated from the consequences. The people who pay the price for luxury beliefs are seldom the people who hold them. Sometimes when I speak about luxury beliefs, critics will reply, “But Rob, you’re talking about elite hypocrisy. That’s nothing new. Elites have always been hypocrites.” And that is correct. Still, I prefer what I call the “John F. Kennedy model of hypocrisy” to what we have now. As many of us now know, JFK was a flawed man, but the image he presented to the American public was that he was a good husband, a good father. In his private life, though, he was a philanderer and often an absentee father and had other shortcomings. But he thought it was important to set an ideal for the general public, even if he fell short of it. And now we have the opposite. Today, our elites get married, they have kids, and for the most part, they live stable, conventional lives. But if you ask them their opinions and attitudes around family, around marriage, around law abidingness, hard work, punctuality, integrity, honesty, and so on, they take a very relaxed attitude. Elites used to pay lip service to conventional values but privately strayed. Now, they are publicly indifferent to or actively support straying, but privately behave in a more conventional way.
Rob Henderson25,543 views • 9 days 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 • 9 months ago
Adam Carolla was on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Here I’ll paraphrase one of Carolla’s most important points from this discussion: “I realized that you have a skill set. Like martial arts. You know it, you’re comfortable with it, you’re secure in it. You know your abilities there, just like you know your abilities as a comedian or as an archer. For me, I’m a carpenter. I have a skill, a trade. There are things I know well, so I don’t feel insecure. I know what I’m good at, and I’m grounded in that. But a lot of people don’t have that. They don’t have a trade or a skill or anything they can honestly call expertise. If you asked them, ‘What are you an expert at?’ they wouldn’t have an answer. You could name several — UFC, mixed martial arts, jiu-jitsu, podcasting, standup, whatever it is. You could learn another language or master an instrument. But so many people never find that thing. They never develop a skill they can own. And because of that, they walk around in this heightened state of insecurity.” This is an insightful point: once you start getting good at something, and it can be almost anything, you can build from there. You now have something to talk about, something you know more about than most people. And if you can make it even mildly interesting, you can speak about it at length. But many people spend their free time on social media or binge-watching TV. It is strange now: if you talk to younger guys and ask what they’re interested in, they’ll tell you about a Netflix show, or getting high, ordering Uber Eats, binge-watching, and maybe sports gambling. If your life is dull and uneventful, and most of your free time is spent scrolling social media, it will be hard to hold anyone’s interest.
Rob Henderson191,435 views • 4 months ago
When "Hamilton" lost its snob appeal. Upper-middle-class people loved “Hamilton” when tickets were prohibitively expensive, but then disparaged it when it became affordable to view on Disney Plus. Once something becomes available to the masses, elites revise their tastes:
Rob Henderson772,049 views • 1 year ago
Powerful women throughout history, such as Cleopatra, did not accumulate large harems of hundreds of attractive young men. They could have, but they didn’t. Generally, men who accumulate status and power, and are not confined by institutional rules or strong social norms, have more female partners than ordinary men. As the Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham has written, “If a male wins power, he will tend to use it to mate with as many females as possible.” In most post-agricultural societies throughout history, such as among the Aztecs, Babylonians, Chinese, Egyptians, Incans, Indians, and Romans, harems of hundreds of women were the norm for kings, emperors and pharaohs. The largest number of children that any man has ever had is 888. This individual was a Moroccan emperor named Ismail the Bloodthirsty, who reigned from 1672 to 1727. Unlike men, equally powerful women didn't form harems full of attractive young members of the opposite sex. Instead, powerful women like Cleopatra entered relationships with powerful men like Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Women have different preferences from men. To be clear, not all powerful males follow this specific pattern. Alexander the Great never showed more than a passing interest in women and fathered just a single child by the time he died at age 32. But Alexander bucked the trend. From my talk at the University of Richmond
Rob Henderson112,297 views • 2 months ago
Giving everyone a universal basic income will not reveal most people’s inner Mozarts or Emily Brontës. At bottom, this is about two competing views of human nature. One view holds that once basic material needs are met, people will use their free time to seek meaning and fulfillment. Unshackled from the burden of work, they will thrive. This is partly true. A small share of people would create, build, and explore. But for most, that is not what happens. When people are out of work, they do not spend their days painting or sculpting or learning another language. They scroll, they watch television, they play video games. Many advocates of UBI assume that people are simply waiting for the right conditions. Remove financial pressure, and they will pursue their creative passions. That may be true for a few. It is not true for most. Another view holds that meaning comes from the act of working. Earning your way, supporting yourself, and taking care of others provide structure and fulfillment. Effort, struggle, and self-reliance are not barriers to a meaningful life. They are part of what makes it possible. A society that removes the need to work risks removing one of the main sources of meaning in life.
Rob Henderson72,440 views • 1 month ago