00:07:05.580And so for a female, what really matters is finding the best mate she can get and then
00:07:11.720getting the most investment from him that she can get. For male, it's really different. A male can
00:07:17.880potentially produce as many kids as women he copulates with in a given year. So you have
00:07:23.720examples like a lot of European males carry a Y chromosome from one of just three Bronze Age males
00:07:33.720who were probably warlords or local leaders. Genghis Khan won. And then Genghis Khan in Asia
00:07:39.080right, sired apparently a lot of kids who carry his wife on his own. And so that's a massive
00:07:45.720difference in terms of the upside of taking risks, right? If you're a male and it's like,
00:07:51.960I have a 50% chance of becoming the local warlord and having dozens of concubines,
00:07:58.680but a 50% chance of dying, you roll those dice, no doubt. That's a risk totally worth taking.
00:08:05.260If you're a woman and it's like, I have a 50% chance of marginally improving my social status and getting a little more resources for my kids, or a 50% chance of dying, you take the opposite choice, right?
00:08:22.080So I think that's the kind of fundamental difference is that males chase status.
00:08:29.600Males are more risk tolerant. Males are willing to go for broke in terms of a lot of
00:08:35.200kinds of competition from politics to sports to academia to art to, you know, whatever they're
00:08:42.780into. And for women, the returns to doing those kinds of risks have traditionally been lower.
00:08:50.780Jeffrey, and there's a question I wanted to ask. You're saying males are more risk tolerant. Is
00:08:54.600that the reason why we get more males in prison than females statistically?
00:08:58.200I think it's one of the reasons. I mean, you also have a basic sex difference in aggression, right?
00:09:03.000Which are male bodies are literally designed to fight.
00:09:06.900There are dozens of aspects of the human face and skull and muscles and bodies and immune system that show we are descended from guys who fought, like, a lot, and we're designed to do that.
00:09:19.800Can you go into a bit more detail on some of those aspects, how we are designed that way?
00:09:24.780Well, there's some recent studies of even just the bone structure of the face
00:09:29.100showing men are kind of built to take a punch more than women.
00:09:33.240The male brain is built to survive rapid acceleration and deceleration
00:09:37.880of the sort that you get if you're being clubbed in the head
00:09:49.180It's great that women are getting into it.
00:09:50.880But I worry a little bit that when women get into, like, striking and grappling and, you know, jiu-jitsu, that they might suffer different injury rates than men do just because of these sex differences and the physicality and the sort of formidability.
00:10:11.080So it's important to understand these things just at a kind of basic medical level.
00:10:17.080Now, I didn't expect the interview to go in this way, but there's been a debate, especially in UFC, about there's a trans fighter who is fighting in the women's category and, by all accounts, absolutely annihilating.
00:10:33.560Do you think that this person is at an unfair advantage to women, has an unfair advantage over women?
00:10:38.380Absolutely. Of course it's an unfair advantage.
00:10:40.320If you grow up with a male body and then decide I'm going to transition, that's totally fine.
00:10:49.920But then if you enter into a domain where you're fighting against women who've grown up with women's bodies and have those adaptations physically and behaviorally, like nobody's really going to care until the first fatality.
00:11:08.880There will be fatalities when trans women beat the living crap out of women in these sports, literally.
00:11:19.360And then we're going to have to rethink, is this really a good idea to sort of follow the trans party line about, you know, sports inclusiveness?
00:11:31.060And why is it, do you think, that actually people are so reluctant to address this if it's putting somebody in physical danger?
00:11:38.880Well, because they're terrified of the reputational danger that they suffer from the trans activists who are among the most vicious and ornery and sort of dogpile-y people on the Internet.
00:11:57.340Everyone I know who's involved in podcasting or YouTubes or public outreach or writing for Quillette, those are the people you have to be most cautious about.
00:12:09.520And so I'm even a little nervous sitting here talking about them.
00:12:12.100But they have instilled a culture of terror that says,
00:12:16.920if you don't follow the way we want you to talk about these issues,
00:12:20.580we will target you, we will come after you,
00:12:23.360and we will accuse you of everything bad we can imagine.
00:12:26.820As you talk about it, I realize that it must be true
00:12:29.620because the conversations we have about this issue are so dishonest now.
00:12:34.260Like, we had a national debate about it like a week ago where Good Morning Britain, one of the most popular shows, they were literally talking about, is it an unfair advantage or not?
00:12:45.960And everyone knows, you know, there are physical differences between men and women.
00:12:50.540And, you know, you talk about differences in aggression.
00:12:53.200You talk about how the body is designed.
00:12:55.180But there's, you know, there's bone density.
00:15:41.720the other sex actually knows what they're doing.
00:15:43.580But there are differences in preferences and interests, like Simon Baron Cohen at Cambridge or Oxford, wherever he is now, has shown, you know, men are more interested in systematizing, which means kind of putting things in order conceptually.
00:16:05.920And that's why you get more male train spotters who are like, this is exciting, like the train's running on schedule.
00:16:12.080I love stamp collecting and like military history, like, oh, no, there's a gap in my knowledge.
00:16:17.660I must learn more about the Ottoman Empire.
00:16:19.920And women are more on average into empathizing, which is kind of connecting with people, understanding their beliefs and desires, building social networks, et cetera.
00:16:31.940And I think that explains a lot of the occupational differences, right, where men tend to go into things that can kind of leverage either their aggressive instincts, like military, or their tendencies to systematize, like coding, computer programming.
00:16:55.160And women tend to go more often into the caring professions, nursing, social work, et cetera.
00:17:01.940And that's not to say that any profession should be only open to one sex.
00:17:07.960I think there's plenty of highly systematizing females, like my girlfriend who you interviewed.
00:17:13.900And there's plenty of highly empathic men who might make great psychotherapists.
00:17:19.720So everybody should be free to follow what they want.
00:17:22.900But we shouldn't necessarily expect any given profession to be 50-50.
00:17:26.960So if I was a gender feminist, I would be screaming at you right now that all of this stuff may well be true, but it's the fault of the patriarchy that men have been indoctrinated to be aggressive.
00:17:37.100It's toxic masculinity and women have been indoctrinated to be caring because those are the less paid professions.
00:17:42.740So that's where we shove all the women.
00:17:45.460You know, evil patriarchy has created this and we must smash it and destroy it.
00:17:52.020And then I'd say go read some anthropology.
00:17:53.580I mean, watch some BBC Natural History.
00:17:58.540Look at the sex differences you see in other animals.
00:18:01.520The bizarre thing about the gender feminist view, right, if you take a broader cross-species perspective,
00:18:09.020is they're basically saying, okay, for the other 4,000 species of mammals,
00:18:14.140you see certain sex differences between males and females
00:18:17.620that just happened to line up perfectly with the gender differences you see in modern humans.
00:18:25.140And then magically, those mammal sex differences got erased.
00:18:29.300And we had a blank slate for a few thousand years, I guess.
00:18:32.780And then there's this evil thing called patriarchy that reinvents from the ground up
00:18:39.220exactly the standard mammalian sex differences and for reasons unknown, imposes them on modern humans.
00:18:46.640Like, that is the least parsimonious theory you can imagine, right?
00:18:53.040Like, why would you go to all that trouble if it could just be, well, we're mammals, always have been.
00:19:02.140The other thing I think that's terrible about the gender feminist view is it basically invalidates all the preferences of currently living men and women, right?
00:19:13.300It basically says to women, you have a false consciousness.
00:19:18.580You think you want this, but that's been put into you by patriarchy.
00:20:13.680It changes a lot in some ways and not much in other ways.
00:20:17.000So, for example, if you look at gay male mating strategies,
00:20:20.360like the preference for novelty and variety and sexual partners,
00:20:24.280the gay men look a lot like street men, right?
00:20:26.980It's just gay men can act the way straight men would want to act
00:20:32.060if straight women were as open to casual sex as other gay men are to other gay men, right?
00:20:38.620Yep. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, I don't know if I was in college and I could have
00:20:45.040flipped the switch between being straight and gay, I might've flipped the gay switch because
00:20:48.620it just seems like so much more fun and so easy to be able to find people who want as much variety
00:20:53.980as you do. By contrast, um, lesbian culture seems to be much more oriented towards make a deep
00:21:03.000connection with one woman and form a long-term relationship. And, you know, the standard joke
00:21:09.180is like third date for a lesbian is, you know, move-in date. It's like get together and then
00:21:17.640live together. So in that way, you kind of have the basic sex difference in
00:21:26.960what you want in a relationship. It just happens to be directed towards a different sex than usual.
00:21:36.180Because there's also talks, you know, apparently with the gender pay gap,
00:21:40.800that the fact that lesbians, there doesn't seem to be that much of a gender pay gap
00:21:44.280between gay women and men in general. Yeah, that's what I've seen. And, you know,
00:21:50.620to the extent that a lesbian will have a slightly more masculinized brain, both kind of genetically
00:21:57.980and hormonally and culturally, right? A lesbian's more used to kind of playing the male role
00:22:03.020in certain ways. Like they need to do that when they're courting each other. Somebody's got to
00:22:08.240take the initiative. Then you might expect that they'd be like more assertive when they are in
00:22:17.200their job or asking for promotions and raises than straight women might be. And also, I think
00:22:25.020gay and lesbian people generally, I don't know if this is still true. I suspect there's a little
00:22:32.280bit of an IQ advantage in general, where I think on average, they're a little smarter.
00:22:38.000They're certainly more open in terms of this personality trait of openness to experience.
00:22:43.060So I would expect that would also play out professionally, right, where some of the advantage that you're seeing that looks like a sexual orientation advantage is actually just kind of being smarter and more open-minded and more assertive, and also just having to deal with more flack from society.
00:23:40.760I think emotionally and in terms of having a strong sense of their identity.
00:23:48.580The irony, of course, now is that I suspect most gay men have a stronger sense of what it means to be a gay man than most straight men have of what it means to be a straight man.
00:24:02.620most straight men are terrified of being called, you know, toxically masculine. And so a lot of
00:24:10.840guys don't know how to behave, unless they're gay. The gay guys know how to behave. Straight guys
00:24:15.640don't. But you said there's a crisis of masculinity. What does that mean? Because I hear this a lot on
00:24:21.220Twitter and all the rest of it. Why do you think there's a crisis of masculinity? I think partly
00:24:26.040it's an engineered crisis. I think partly it's an intentionally designed crisis from gender feminism,
00:24:31.300which is to take away all the traditional sources of masculine virtue and meaning and to say those
00:24:40.080are invalid, right? Being a traditional hunter archetype or warrior archetype is no longer valid.
00:24:48.920You're not allowed to do that. And men are like, well, what are we allowed to do in the gender
00:24:53.540feministically. Not our problem. We don't give a shit. That's what you say. And partly it's a
00:25:03.380crisis that's created by the sort of legal atmosphere, the Me Too movement, the terror
00:25:09.040of being accused of sexual harassment or stalking or coercion. Partly it's the feminized psychotherapy
00:25:17.560movement where, you know, if men are having trouble in a relationship and they go to a
00:25:22.500therapist, which will usually be a woman. It'll be a kind of two-on-one, you know, women beating
00:25:30.260up a guy emotionally, saying, everything you want and believe and desire is illegitimate.
00:25:38.140And you have to change to be more like us. So I think part of the crisis is from my own field,
00:25:46.400psychology. We were talking about this before you got here with Francis. And, you know, I
00:25:52.260I certainly feel like we're starting to live in a society which assumes that a lot of the basic male desires, wishes, behaviors are in and of themselves toxic.
00:26:03.420And we were talking about just Jordan Peterson.
00:26:06.760The number one question that I see him being asked every single interview is, most of your following is male.
00:26:15.700And the only way you would ask that question, I think, is if you thought there was something wrong with being male.
00:26:23.560Because otherwise, like Francis said, you know, if it was mostly women that were following someone, that would never even get brought up because it wouldn't be considered noteworthy.
00:32:54.020And then the guys who go full red pill but not in a smart way, right, can get so belligerent
00:33:01.460and spend so much time fighting other red pill guys and becoming such assholes and turning
00:33:07.680into trolls that, A, that's not very attractive either.
00:33:13.020B, it's kind of hard to have a happy life if you sort of go around, in a way, hating
00:33:19.360women and blaming them for everything.
00:33:22.460So what I hope is that evolutionary psychology offers kind of a reasonable middle ground
00:33:27.400where you can assert your masculinity without being a dick about it.
00:33:35.700I think that's so important, and that's why we're grateful that you've come and talked to us,
00:33:40.160because I think these issues need to be talked about, because that polarization that we see in
00:33:44.700politics, which I want to get onto in a second, it's happening in society as well. It's happening
00:33:49.420between men and women too. And like you say, people are either chopping their balls off,
00:33:54.180essentially, metaphorically, or they're becoming assholes, genuinely misogynistic assholes. And
00:33:59.500you see it online all the time. And that helps no one because, you know, I've always said this,
00:34:04.640like historically, the two groups of people who've always needed to stick together more than anyone
00:34:08.880is men and women. That's the two groups of people that have needed to cooperate throughout history
00:34:13.840more than anyone, right? Yeah. And if you take a step back from it and you ask,
00:34:20.460whose interests are really served, right, by alienating men from women and vice versa
00:34:28.120and creating this like weird little proxy war between the sexes, I think the answer is it's
00:34:36.520not really in the interests of either sex. I think it's in the interests of kind of in a way the
00:34:43.360corporate and political powers that be in the elites and it's a kind of divide and conquer,
00:34:47.920I think it's a lot easier to control a population in a complex civilization like Britain or America if you have quite a bit of tension between the sexes.
00:35:01.660I think also at a marketing level, it helps sell shit because it creates profound insecurity in both sexes.
00:35:11.940You know, guys are like, I don't know what masculinity means anymore, so I better buy some more shit just in case.
00:35:17.920And the same thing happens with women. So I think if we could take a step back from this battle of
00:35:26.040the sexes and ask, you know, who's really profiting from it? Obviously, the political
00:35:32.240parties in America are profiting from it. I don't know to what extent that's also true here.
00:35:37.480But if you also have kind of sexually polarized politics, then, man, people just take more
00:35:44.500interest in politics, because everyone's interested in their sex and their relationships
00:35:50.680and gender issues, and if you can politicize that, man, that gets out the vote, that gets
00:35:59.820people passionate about a lot of political issues.
00:36:05.880And I think we're all being kind of manipulated by that.
00:36:11.680What you just said there was just incredibly worrying, really, because the fact that we're being manipulated, do you think it's a vert, what they're doing?
00:36:23.600Do you think somebody's there making a conscious choice or there's a group of people making that choice?
00:36:30.280I think there's a group of kind of cynical journalists who track, you know, what pieces get reactions, right?
00:36:37.800And it's mostly kind of the online journalism world, Vox.com or whatever.
00:36:45.600And I think it's not that they intended to stir up a battle of the sexes in order to create, you know, more need and insecurity and polarization.
00:36:58.840But I think they noted that that is a direction you can go.
00:37:57.300Do you have any insight as to how we can move on from this, how we can start to move back towards the right place of connection between men and women and not having that fracture in society in general?
00:38:12.320Well, I think, you know, the rise of certain kinds of online culture and journalism, like, you know, these kinds of interviews or the intellectual dark web or Quillette or places that are kind of not quite academia but not quite mainstream journalism, that's great.
00:38:34.380I think that can help. It really only reaches the minority of people who care about kind of
00:38:39.920articulating ideas and learning about stuff. I think the thing that would make it go more
00:38:46.760mainstream would be sort of public figures. I mean, Jordan Peterson is kind of straddling this
00:38:53.940at the moment. He's got kind of one foot in intellectual dark web, but one foot in the kind
00:38:59.160of Tony Robbins self-help mass movement thing. And I'm all for that. I think that's awesome.
00:39:05.700That's what I was trying to do with my mate book a few years ago, frankly.
00:39:09.620But I think what you need more is maybe, I don't know, celebrity couples going on camera together
00:39:16.100and kind of explaining, here's how we manage this in our relationship. Here's our power dynamics.
00:39:23.980Here's what we do. Take it or leave it. If it works for you, great, imitate it.
00:39:28.540Or even better, here's what we learned from this other power couple.
00:39:36.860And this is one reason why my girlfriend Diana Fleischman and I have been doing interviews together,
00:39:43.040is not that we've figured out everything, but we think it's important for articulate people to kind of be more open about their own relationships.
00:39:53.540And I think that can be quite healing at the kind of political and ideological level.
00:44:43.940And I didn't get tattoos at all until the girlfriend made me watch some reality TV tattoo things like Ink Master, which is the big American competition between tattoo artists.
00:44:58.900So I've watched way more hours of Ink Master than I would want to admit.
00:45:04.060And I don't have any tattoos, but I do at least appreciate the artistry and the culture and the different styles.
00:45:11.260and how much it means to someone to kind of make a permanent commitment to, like, this is part of my identity.
00:45:21.020This is a significant event in my life.
00:45:23.440This is an important person in my life.
00:45:26.120And I'm going to just seize it as part of my persona and display it so everyone can see it.
00:45:37.420I think there's a kind of admirable courage in that.
00:45:40.060But I think it's also a highly risky strategy because people can, like, change their minds about who they're in love with or what their identity is or what their political allegiance is or, you know, what their aesthetic taste is.
00:45:54.900So you can end up with the sort of, oh, God, I don't want anyone to see this because that was, you know, 10 years ago and I'm a different person now.
00:46:09.420Yeah. And I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but just since we've gone down this track of the conversation, do you have any kind of interesting thoughts about the changes in how people look and dress and like hipster beards puzzle me? You've got this like 20-year-old with a beard like down to his knees. What's that all about?
00:46:30.420I think for a lot of men, it's a search for authentic masculinity.
00:46:37.680And I lived in New York in 2013 when I was teaching at the business school there, and
00:46:44.340I dated a woman who lived in the sort of epicenter of Brooklyn hipster culture.
00:46:50.800So I got very, very familiar with hipster culture.
00:50:32.620Read more nonfiction and watch less TV, probably, or listen to more podcasts with interesting, smart people and watch less TV, or do anything and play fewer video games.
00:50:46.940I think a lot of the manosphere is in this panic about you should never watch porn and never masturbate and never watch video games, and that's just dumb.
00:50:56.400But I think, like, pay attention to how you're allocating your leisure time.
00:51:02.060And if you're allocating your leisure time in a way that builds you up into a more interesting person, women will notice eventually.
00:51:10.780And you'll feel better about yourself and more confident about approaching women.
00:51:16.960And then finally, online dating is awesome.
00:51:19.300And just find an online dating app that actually lets you showcase what is good about yourself.
00:51:26.400If you look awesome, then Tinder is great.
00:51:30.540But if you don't look awesome, find some other dating app other than Tinder
00:51:34.840that lets you share more of your intelligence and creativity
00:51:40.160and verbal skills and humor and whatever.
00:51:50.300Well, listen, before we've got about 10 minutes, let's talk politics a little bit.
00:51:56.400I'm curious because I think as an evolution psychologist, you might have quite some insight into the place that we are at now in terms of how divided we are, how polarized we are, how tribal we've become.
00:52:08.760And that strikes me, like I see that instinct within myself to find the tribe and to go, oh, this is what I am.
00:52:17.400Everyone else is evil. Fight, fight, fight.
00:52:19.620And I have to resist that urge within myself.
00:52:22.380But I think a lot of us, we don't do that.
00:52:25.420we just dive in, we start attacking other people. So where are we? How are we there? What is it
00:52:31.820about us as human beings that makes us that way? And how can we depolarize ourselves?
00:52:37.080I think one important thing to remember is that when humans were evolving for the last couple
00:52:41.520million years, we were very often in contact with other hominids, other bipedal hominids
00:52:48.480running around on two legs with pretty big brains who were different species or different subspecies
00:52:54.720who were literally not us, like they weren't us, they were competing with us.
00:53:01.820And we get kind of confused because we're the last hominid standing.
00:53:06.100Like we out-competed all of them and they went extinct.
00:53:09.400Some of them we poached some of their genes like the Neanderthals or the Denisovans or
00:53:17.560But we didn't evolve in a kind of multicultural kumbaya kind of setting where everyone
00:53:24.700not along right we evolved to compete against other beings that kind of looked like us and kind
00:53:34.340of didn't and where we weren't probably not very nice to them and not very welcoming that's another
00:53:41.700statement right there jeffrey so we probably killed them brutally let's be probably we killed
00:53:49.560them really but we probably also just kind of out competed them and like we got this cave and
00:53:53.640they didn't get the cave and there they are freezing to death and we don't give a shit.
00:53:59.300So one level, it's absolutely astonishing that you can have a multicultural city like modern
00:54:05.740London with millions of people from hundreds of countries and not have massive like ethnic
00:54:12.500riots all the time. It's amazing we can achieve that. That's not something that could have been
00:54:18.660predicted maybe 500 years ago. So I think when people go, oh no, we're so partisan and racist
00:54:27.100and xenophobic, it's like, compared to what? Compared to what standard? Compared to angels,
00:54:33.240maybe? Compared to what you would have expected given our evolutionary history? It's astonishing
00:54:39.380that multicultural societies work as well as they do. And they don't work perfectly,
00:54:45.520and maybe they're not optimal. But, you know, the evolutionary perspective lets you
00:54:52.380just give people a little bit of credit for things being as peaceful as they are.
00:55:01.140Well, it's not just the evolutionary perspective. For me, someone who comes from Russia as an
00:55:04.620immigrant to this country, first generation, the perspective of having lived in places outside of
00:55:09.560Western Europe and North America, it teaches you very quickly about how tolerant and welcoming
00:55:15.660and accepting and not homophobic and all the rest of it this country is or this part of the world
00:55:21.980is. And I think we've definitely lost the sense of just like, what are we comparing to? Absolutely.
00:55:28.700But I think there is no question that our societies are now more divided than they have
00:55:33.040been for a while. Not ever, of course, that's ridiculous, but than they have been for a while.
00:55:36.740In America, the political side of it, as we talked about, you know, the race and gender has become, I mean, I don't think anyone sees the next Democratic nominee for president as a straight white man.
00:55:50.440And that's how predictable it's become, right?
00:55:53.920So what are some of the ways that we can start to take that edge of politics and start to come back to a genuine conversation about issues?
00:56:06.740Yeah. It's really tough. I mean, there's basically two paths that you can choose to go. One is kind of double down on multiculturalism and say, this is the path forward and let's figure out how to make it work as well as possible.
00:56:23.120And the other path is a kind of freedom of association that says, you know what, if a certain group wants to, like, sort of take over a certain neighborhood or gated community or city and just have it for them, then they should be able to do that.
00:56:40.700And there's, like, nothing wrong with that.
00:56:49.300Is that the position you're advocating?
00:56:50.740i think it's a thing that's worth experimenting with i think a lot of people would be troubled
00:56:57.240by that i know certainly yeah well they can be troubled by it and they can they can form their
00:57:01.900own community where they can get together and be troubled by it but is there not an argument for
00:57:06.600a nation uh jeffrey the idea that we are all let's say british right we all come to this country we
00:57:12.760all integrate we all talk to one another uh we all understand we all have a common set of values
00:57:18.100we maybe have a national service where we all go and meet people from different ethnic groups and
00:57:22.600whatever. I know a lot of people, one of our recent guests, Peter Hitchens, talked about the
00:57:27.000fact that one of the problems with mass immigration is that people don't integrate and then everyone
00:57:32.080lives in their own ghetto. And I certainly would, as someone who is an immigrant, I would be
00:57:36.840troubled if there was a Russian ghetto of 100,000 Russians in the center of London. I would be
00:57:42.300troubled by that. Or as it's otherwise called Mayfair. But that's a very particular thing,
00:57:48.120right? So I would be very worried about living in a society where essentially we all became our
00:57:53.200own little tribe that lived in its own little place. And I don't see that as still being a
00:57:59.300nation, really. Right. So what you need is, if you're going to have a nation at all, right,
00:58:06.340it's either got to be an ethnostate where it's sort of defined by ethnicity, or it's got to be
00:58:11.400civic nationalism, where it's defined by shared language, values, education, mass media,
00:58:20.000everybody buying into the same criminal justice system and the same norms for how the sexes
00:58:27.520relate and how the mating market operates and all of that. And you can totally have civic
00:58:32.100nationalism. That can succeed. It succeeded okay in America and in Britain. What you can't have
00:58:39.460is a nation where it's fake civic nationalism, where you give lip service to civic nationalism,
00:58:46.560but you don't actually have integration. If it's like, welcome to Britain, you don't have to learn
00:58:53.280English. Welcome to Britain, you don't have to respect our criminal justice system. Welcome to
00:58:58.620Britain, you don't actually have to join our educational system. I think that's a recipe for
00:59:03.220catastrophe. Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people, that's why I wanted to clarify what you
00:59:07.460said because a lot of people would have heard you saying that and I think a lot of people would be
00:59:13.320troubled by that as I am I'm troubled by that you know I'm troubled by that I think we do need
00:59:17.320a genuine civic nationalism where we all have it there are some values that everybody understands
00:59:23.120as being British values we all buy into that and unfortunately that's not the direction that we
00:59:27.660seem to be going in you know even saying that seems to be oh you're racist somehow you know
00:59:32.780the idea that we should all have a common set of values or a common language or you know whatever
00:59:36.900But I think, well, the other thing is I'm not necessarily advocating civic nationalism because I think it's important to realize it is an experiment that has not withstood the test of time for centuries.
00:59:48.900It's not typical of most nation states throughout history.
00:59:53.220It's also not typical of most nation states currently around the world, right?
00:59:59.800China is a Han Chinese ethnostate, right?
01:00:17.620So it remains to be seen in the coming decades how does their model of a kind of technocratic,
01:00:27.660long-term thinking, slightly despotic ethnostate, how well does that play out
01:00:33.720compared to, let's say, multicultural British civic nationalism.
01:00:38.920Do I hear you suggesting that they're probably more competitive as a system?
01:00:46.440Well, who's going to colonize Mars first? China, obviously.
01:00:52.060Who's going to nominate the world in terms of soft power? China, I think, obviously.
01:00:57.500So, I think it's important to, you know, while Europe and America are sort of squabbling about our partisanship and toxic masculinity and whatever we're worried about, to keep our eye on the fact that we've already kind of become a sideshow to the main current of civilization, which is Han China.
01:01:23.960and in a way I'm sort of more interested in what they do long term
01:01:30.880than what happens in Britain or America.
01:01:34.760Well, just to stick for a second with what's happening in Britain or America
01:02:47.980Here's a dozen policies that violate the First Amendment.
01:02:51.380other senators would be like, so what? We don't give a shit. Free speech is an outdated medieval
01:02:56.580concept. Medieval. Yeah, there was loads of free speech in medieval times. Yeah.
01:03:05.780So when Trump came out a couple of weeks ago and said, I'd like to do an executive order that says
01:03:11.520man, if you're in a public university and you do not follow First Amendment free speech principles,
01:03:17.380I will cut off federal funding. I was like, yay, this is what we need. I've been advocating that
01:03:23.060for two years. That is the only thing that will get administrators to take free speech seriously.
01:03:29.740Nothing else will, I know, because I've tried it. And then, sadly, some of my free speech
01:03:35.220colleagues were like, this is terrible. This is top down. We can't have this associated with
01:03:40.060Trump. And are you guys kidding? If Obama had done this, if Obama had said, respect free speech or I
01:03:48.360cut funding, everybody would be going, yay. At least the pro free speech left. So I think
01:03:55.460I'm guardedly optimistic that Trump might follow through on this. I hope if he does an executive
01:04:02.280order that it's well written and that it fits constitutional law. I hope that universities
01:04:09.120will react to it by saying, fuck, you're right. We were bad. We were bad. And we're going to
01:04:16.940try to, you know, play nice according to the Constitution. My worry is it'll just create
01:04:23.300more polarization and people will be like, fuck you, Trump. We're not going to do any of this.
01:04:32.720and because there's a lot of people who believe that you know free speech like you said is a
01:04:39.340cover for hate speech can you just articulate and as somebody whose mother comes from Venezuela I
01:04:43.940can't believe I'm asking this question but why is free speech on campus and outside so important
01:04:49.120I'm sorry for the question but I have to ask it free speech is important generally because we
01:04:56.200should all be humble about what we know and what we believe and open to changing our minds
01:05:00.240And you can't have an open public debate that shares information freely if you have certain groups of people saying, that's forbidden, that's forbidden, that viewpoint is invalid.
01:05:12.600You need to actually have a rough and tumble, like radically honest conversation in society.
01:05:20.580Now, the trouble is, that actually depends on the infrastructure of civic nationalism.
01:05:26.860It actually depends on people knowing a common language, having some common values, having some common historical education.
01:05:39.180And then the second part is why is free speech so important on campuses is campuses are the point of ideological indoctrination in America.
01:05:49.480That's where you learn the proper views that you're supposed to have.
01:05:53.760and the left has understood this since the late 60s, right?