TRIGGERnometry - Geoffrey Miller on Sex Differences, Masculinity & Political Polarisation

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00:00:23.600 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:27.300 I'm Constantine Kissinger.

00:00:28.280 And this is a show for you if you're bored of watching people having arguments on the

00:00:32.520 internet over subjects they know nothing about.

00:00:35.700 At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:40.320 Our absolutely fantastic expert guest this week is an evolutionary psychologist and author,

00:00:45.520 Jeffrey Miller.

00:00:46.240 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:47.360 Great to be here.

00:00:48.080 It's great to have you here.

00:00:49.620 The first question we always ask is just tell our audience, many of whom will know who you

00:00:53.440 are, a little bit about who you are, how are you, where you are, what's been your journey

00:00:57.480 through life so far? Well, I'm currently working as an evolutionary psychology professor, so I

00:01:02.360 study human nature, and I work at a little place called University of New Mexico, which is actually

00:01:07.460 in America, in New Mexico. And I spent nine years in Britain, so I'm pretty familiar with British

00:01:13.120 culture throughout the 90s. And I had, you know, pretty straightforward academic life, undergrad,

00:01:20.600 grad school, postdocs, yada, yada, get tenure, do research, write books. And I guess over the

00:01:28.080 last few years, I've sort of tried to cultivate more of a public facing persona on Twitter and

00:01:37.120 doing interviews like this, because I think there's a lot of stuff that evolutionary psychologists

00:01:43.820 in particular know about that the public should also know about, and that's relevant to a lot of

00:01:48.620 current debates. And so what is evolutionary psychology? Because, you know, there's so many

00:01:54.460 different strands of it, but how would you sum it up? It's a science that really only started about

00:01:59.740 30 years ago. It kind of started when I was in grad school at Stanford, and it was sort of being

00:02:04.760 invented under my nose by some of the folks who are working there, like Lita Cosmides, John Tooby,

00:02:11.040 David Boss, Steve Pinker. And some of those names you might know, it's basically the attempt to

00:02:17.700 understand human nature by pulling together a lot of ideas and information from different

00:02:23.280 fields like evolutionary biology and genetics and animal behavior and primate research and

00:02:31.320 hunter-gatherer anthropology. You kind of mix it all up and you distill it down and

00:02:36.380 you get insights into what were our ancestors doing and what did they have to do to survive

00:02:43.880 and find mates and reproduce and raise kids and live in groups. So I spend a lot of my time with

00:02:49.500 my head sort of back in prehistory, right? Thinking, what was life like? What were the

00:02:56.720 challenges? Like, how did they court each other? How did they fall in love? How did they form

00:03:02.300 relationships? How did that all work? And you, you know, obviously it's a little speculative,

00:03:08.880 but you do the best you can trying to bring together these different information sources.

00:03:14.600 You develop hypotheses, then you test them, and usually they fail. You go back and invent more

00:03:22.100 hypotheses and test them, and you try to get to the truth. And that's the game. That's

00:03:27.600 evolutionary psychology. And it's a fairly established field now. There was a time when

00:03:31.660 people kind of didn't take it seriously, but it is very established. And you talk about

00:03:35.180 the fact that there are certain things that you guys in your field now know that the general public

00:03:40.260 maybe do not. And in fact, that maybe is being pushed back against by certain elements. So tell

00:03:46.040 us a little bit about some of those things. What are the things that you guys scientifically have

00:03:50.760 established about human beings that are not known or controversial nowadays?

00:03:57.360 I guess two big things I would talk about is that there used to be a stereotype,

00:04:02.340 kind of in moral psychology that if you think about human morality and ethics and how we treat 0.97

00:04:07.920 each other, there is a view that in prehistory, everybody was kind of selfish and stupid and 0.99

00:04:13.560 terrible. And then you invent civilization and religion and kind of gradually make people 0.99

00:04:18.560 behave better. I think that's dead wrong. I think our capacity for kindness and altruism

00:04:26.100 and for signaling our moral virtues goes way back really deeply, like hundreds of thousands

00:04:31.900 of years and in modern society we're also nice and virtuous and and we try to be good to each

00:04:37.420 other and signal our virtues and do virtue signaling i think virtue signaling is at least

00:04:42.340 a million years old do you reckon someone was doing that on the walls of a cave saying yeah

00:04:47.560 i think so i think so like racism is bad racism is bad and behold the mammoth that i killed for

00:04:54.060 the greater good of the group because the mammoth had wrong think and it needed to die.

00:05:00.900 And so I think that the roots of human morality go back deep and it's not just a matter of culture

00:05:07.740 kind of making us nicer. The second big thing I would say is sex differences. I think evolutionary

00:05:13.780 psychology has a really good understanding of why men and women tend to pursue different

00:05:19.400 mating strategies and courtship strategies and have different priorities and preferences when

00:05:25.720 it comes to relationships. A lot of that is caricatured and exaggerated in the popular

00:05:32.580 press. A lot of it is sort of taken up by like the manosphere and the red pill guys and the

00:05:39.200 men's rights activists and sort of twisted and distorted in various ways. But I think we're a

00:05:45.180 really useful counterbalance against gender feminism. Let's dive right into that because 1.00

00:05:51.260 you talk about how some of those things are distorted on both sides. So just for anyone

00:05:55.900 who doesn't know anything about men and women, who doesn't know anything about evolutionary

00:05:59.260 psychology, can you just break down what are the differences between men and women physiologically

00:06:04.320 and psychologically? And before we start, can I just make it absolutely clear that I don't see

00:06:08.780 gender? I think it's very important to my woke followers. Sorry, Gary. You don't have any. 1.00

00:06:15.180 The basic difference, right, the fundamental difference is females, by definition, make a few larger gametes called eggs. 1.00

00:06:25.380 Males, by definition, make a lot of smaller gametes called sperm.

00:06:29.300 And a lot of else flows from that, right?

00:06:31.660 If you're the sex that makes only a few gametes, it matters a lot who you choose as a mate, right?

00:06:38.980 And particularly if you get pregnant inside your body instead of just laying eggs, right?

00:06:44.080 If you have internal pregnancy and gestation and then breastfeeding, a female human can 0.99

00:06:50.940 only produce a kid about every two or three years under ancestral conditions where there's

00:06:56.460 not like a big food glut.

00:06:58.800 So her rate of reproduction is very limited.

00:07:04.080 It's rate limited.

00:07:05.580 And so for a female, what really matters is finding the best mate she can get and then 0.99

00:07:11.720 getting the most investment from him that she can get. For male, it's really different. A male can

00:07:17.880 potentially produce as many kids as women he copulates with in a given year. So you have

00:07:23.720 examples like a lot of European males carry a Y chromosome from one of just three Bronze Age males

00:07:33.720 who were probably warlords or local leaders. Genghis Khan won. And then Genghis Khan in Asia

00:07:39.080 right, sired apparently a lot of kids who carry his wife on his own. And so that's a massive 0.91

00:07:45.720 difference in terms of the upside of taking risks, right? If you're a male and it's like,

00:07:51.960 I have a 50% chance of becoming the local warlord and having dozens of concubines, 1.00

00:07:58.680 but a 50% chance of dying, you roll those dice, no doubt. That's a risk totally worth taking.

00:08:05.260 If 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?

00:08:20.300 You're more risk averse.

00:08:22.080 So I think that's the kind of fundamental difference is that males chase status.

00:08:29.600 Males are more risk tolerant. Males are willing to go for broke in terms of a lot of 0.57

00:08:35.200 kinds of competition from politics to sports to academia to art to, you know, whatever they're

00:08:42.780 into. And for women, the returns to doing those kinds of risks have traditionally been lower. 0.96

00:08:50.780 Jeffrey, and there's a question I wanted to ask. You're saying males are more risk tolerant. Is

00:08:54.600 that the reason why we get more males in prison than females statistically? 0.99

00:08:58.200 I think it's one of the reasons. I mean, you also have a basic sex difference in aggression, right?

00:09:03.000 Which are male bodies are literally designed to fight. 0.93

00:09:06.900 There 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.

00:09:19.800 Can you go into a bit more detail on some of those aspects, how we are designed that way?

00:09:24.780 Well, there's some recent studies of even just the bone structure of the face

00:09:29.100 showing men are kind of built to take a punch more than women.

00:09:33.240 The male brain is built to survive rapid acceleration and deceleration 0.89

00:09:37.880 of the sort that you get if you're being clubbed in the head

00:09:40.480 more than the female brain is. 1.00

00:09:44.440 And I think this is why, like, I love mixed martial arts.

00:09:48.080 I love combat sports.

00:09:49.180 It's great that women are getting into it. 1.00

00:09:50.880 But 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.

00:10:11.080 So it's important to understand these things just at a kind of basic medical level.

00:10:17.080 Now, 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.

00:10:33.560 Do you think that this person is at an unfair advantage to women, has an unfair advantage over women?

00:10:38.380 Absolutely. Of course it's an unfair advantage.

00:10:40.320 If you grow up with a male body and then decide I'm going to transition, that's totally fine. 0.56

00:10:46.580 You can do that.

00:10:47.360 I'm a libertarian.

00:10:48.280 Do what you want with your body.

00:10:49.920 But 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.

00:11:07.160 But there will be fatalities. 0.99

00:11:08.880 There will be fatalities when trans women beat the living crap out of women in these sports, literally. 1.00

00:11:19.360 And 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? 0.99

00:11:31.060 And why is it, do you think, that actually people are so reluctant to address this if it's putting somebody in physical danger?

00:11:38.880 Well, 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. 0.99

00:11:56.200 Everyone's frightened of them.

00:11:57.340 Everyone 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.

00:12:09.520 And so I'm even a little nervous sitting here talking about them.

00:12:12.100 But they have instilled a culture of terror that says,

00:12:16.920 if you don't follow the way we want you to talk about these issues,

00:12:20.580 we will target you, we will come after you, 0.54

00:12:23.360 and we will accuse you of everything bad we can imagine.

00:12:26.820 As you talk about it, I realize that it must be true

00:12:29.620 because the conversations we have about this issue are so dishonest now.

00:12:34.260 Like, 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?

00:12:45.960 And everyone knows, you know, there are physical differences between men and women.

00:12:50.540 And, you know, you talk about differences in aggression.

00:12:53.200 You talk about how the body is designed.

00:12:55.180 But there's, you know, there's bone density.

00:12:57.080 There's lung capacity.

00:12:58.260 There's heart size.

00:12:59.320 All of these things are different between men and women.

00:13:01.900 And everyone knows it.

00:13:03.400 And yet, we talk about it as if it's a debate.

00:13:08.400 I guess the turning point for me was in high school, I was taking Taekwondo, which is a Korean combat sport.

00:13:14.400 And I wasn't that good. I was like a green belt, which is barely an advanced beginner.

00:13:19.400 And then you do your sparring where you're supposed to sort of show that you're ready to advance the brown belt.

00:13:26.400 So I was pitted against a college woman who was a black belt and told spar, go ahead. 1.00

00:13:33.340 And I was like, sensei, I'm not sure this is safe because, like, I'm five inches taller and I'm only 17.

00:13:40.140 But I don't know if her skill can overcome my just size.

00:13:45.060 And he's like, don't worry about it.

00:13:46.220 She's well trained.

00:13:48.080 And within a minute, I'd done like a roundhouse kick and just knocked her flat out, much to my total chagrin. 0.82

00:13:56.140 a bit of a crush on her. And sorry for knocking you out. And at that point, I realized like

00:14:04.760 society is fed a line of bullshit about this. And it is a danger to women. It was a danger to her. 1.00

00:14:15.240 And it's also kind of an emotional danger to men because we literally don't realize our own

00:14:20.540 strength. And if we're being, you know, fed a lot of movie images of like, of course, you know,

00:14:30.020 this female Marvel Avenger, you know, female assassin could overcome whatever the Hulk. It's 0.86

00:14:36.840 like, no, no, she couldn't. Like there's no catching up once there's a certain size difference.

00:14:44.480 So we got into politics very quickly. Francis and I had the idea that we would stay away from it

00:14:49.380 and talk about your relationship in psychology.

00:14:51.340 So let's keep exploring.

00:14:53.020 So you talk about there's a difference in aggression.

00:14:55.260 I assume that's because, again, men evolved to fight.

00:14:58.720 What are some of the other differences between men and women,

00:15:00.920 particularly when it comes to things like preferences

00:15:02.820 and things that people are interested in and pursue?

00:15:05.780 Because that has quite a big impact on our jobs, careers,

00:15:08.640 you know, gender pay gap, et cetera. 1.00

00:15:10.320 Yeah.

00:15:10.960 I think, so I supported James Damore, the guy from Google,

00:15:15.120 who said there are important sex differences in personality traits,

00:15:19.380 and there tend to be sex differences in interests.

00:15:22.260 So one important thing to realize is

00:15:24.180 there is not an average sex difference in IQ itself.

00:15:27.880 Like overall intelligence is pretty much dead even

00:15:31.460 between men and women.

00:15:33.700 And it's disappointing to both sexes.

00:15:37.360 Who hope, each sex desperately hopes 0.99

00:15:41.720 the other sex actually knows what they're doing. 1.00

00:15:43.580 But 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.

00:16:05.920 And that's why you get more male train spotters who are like, this is exciting, like the train's running on schedule.

00:16:12.080 I love stamp collecting and like military history, like, oh, no, there's a gap in my knowledge.

00:16:17.660 I must learn more about the Ottoman Empire.

00:16:19.920 And women are more on average into empathizing, which is kind of connecting with people, understanding their beliefs and desires, building social networks, et cetera. 0.98

00:16:30.540 And I think that's accurate.

00:16:31.940 And 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.

00:16:55.160 And women tend to go more often into the caring professions, nursing, social work, et cetera. 0.99

00:17:01.940 And that's not to say that any profession should be only open to one sex.

00:17:07.960 I think there's plenty of highly systematizing females, like my girlfriend who you interviewed. 1.00

00:17:13.900 And there's plenty of highly empathic men who might make great psychotherapists.

00:17:19.720 So everybody should be free to follow what they want.

00:17:22.900 But we shouldn't necessarily expect any given profession to be 50-50.

00:17:26.960 So 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.

00:17:37.100 It's toxic masculinity and women have been indoctrinated to be caring because those are the less paid professions. 1.00

00:17:42.740 So that's where we shove all the women. 1.00

00:17:45.460 You know, evil patriarchy has created this and we must smash it and destroy it. 0.99

00:17:50.460 Yeah. 0.99

00:17:50.980 Well, that's fine.

00:17:52.020 And then I'd say go read some anthropology.

00:17:53.580 I mean, watch some BBC Natural History.

00:17:58.540 Look at the sex differences you see in other animals.

00:18:01.520 The bizarre thing about the gender feminist view, right, if you take a broader cross-species perspective, 1.00

00:18:09.020 is they're basically saying, okay, for the other 4,000 species of mammals,

00:18:14.140 you see certain sex differences between males and females

00:18:17.620 that just happened to line up perfectly with the gender differences you see in modern humans.

00:18:25.140 And then magically, those mammal sex differences got erased.

00:18:29.300 And we had a blank slate for a few thousand years, I guess.

00:18:32.780 And then there's this evil thing called patriarchy that reinvents from the ground up

00:18:39.220 exactly the standard mammalian sex differences and for reasons unknown, imposes them on modern humans.

00:18:46.640 Like, that is the least parsimonious theory you can imagine, right?

00:18:53.040 Like, why would you go to all that trouble if it could just be, well, we're mammals, always have been.

00:19:02.140 The 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? 0.91

00:19:13.300 It basically says to women, you have a false consciousness. 1.00

00:19:18.580 You think you want this, but that's been put into you by patriarchy.

00:19:22.900 It's not a valid view.

00:19:24.960 And it says to men, you think you want this.

00:19:28.020 It's toxic masculinity.

00:19:29.820 You don't really want it.

00:19:31.060 It's been indoctrinated.

00:19:33.040 Your beliefs are invalid.

00:19:34.920 So what are we going to do?

00:19:36.100 Have one or two or three generations where everybody's preferences about everything

00:19:41.200 are treated with contempt, right?

00:19:45.420 That seems to be the gender feminist view, 1.00

00:19:47.780 that at some future point,

00:19:51.240 we will create people whose preferences we can take seriously.

00:19:55.920 But until that point, we basically have to engineer people 0.96

00:19:59.660 to do a whole bunch of shit that they don't want to do. 0.98

00:20:03.580 Now, what you're saying with the difference of sex differences, 0.99

00:20:06.840 male and female, does it change a little bit with gay men and women?

00:20:10.280 or is it very much the same for them?

00:20:13.680 It changes a lot in some ways and not much in other ways.

00:20:17.000 So, for example, if you look at gay male mating strategies,

00:20:20.360 like the preference for novelty and variety and sexual partners, 0.97

00:20:24.280 the gay men look a lot like street men, right? 1.00

00:20:26.980 It's just gay men can act the way straight men would want to act 0.99

00:20:32.060 if straight women were as open to casual sex as other gay men are to other gay men, right? 0.99

00:20:38.620 Yep. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, I don't know if I was in college and I could have 0.99

00:20:45.040 flipped the switch between being straight and gay, I might've flipped the gay switch because 1.00

00:20:48.620 it just seems like so much more fun and so easy to be able to find people who want as much variety

00:20:53.980 as you do. By contrast, um, lesbian culture seems to be much more oriented towards make a deep 0.90

00:21:03.000 connection with one woman and form a long-term relationship. And, you know, the standard joke

00:21:09.180 is like third date for a lesbian is, you know, move-in date. It's like get together and then 0.99

00:21:17.640 live together. So in that way, you kind of have the basic sex difference in

00:21:26.960 what you want in a relationship. It just happens to be directed towards a different sex than usual. 0.64

00:21:36.180 Because there's also talks, you know, apparently with the gender pay gap,

00:21:40.800 that the fact that lesbians, there doesn't seem to be that much of a gender pay gap 1.00

00:21:44.280 between gay women and men in general. Yeah, that's what I've seen. And, you know,

00:21:50.620 to the extent that a lesbian will have a slightly more masculinized brain, both kind of genetically 1.00

00:21:57.980 and hormonally and culturally, right? A lesbian's more used to kind of playing the male role 1.00

00:22:03.020 in certain ways. Like they need to do that when they're courting each other. Somebody's got to

00:22:08.240 take the initiative. Then you might expect that they'd be like more assertive when they are in

00:22:17.200 their job or asking for promotions and raises than straight women might be. And also, I think

00:22:25.020 gay and lesbian people generally, I don't know if this is still true. I suspect there's a little 1.00

00:22:32.280 bit of an IQ advantage in general, where I think on average, they're a little smarter.

00:22:38.000 They're certainly more open in terms of this personality trait of openness to experience.

00:22:43.060 So 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.

00:23:05.820 So getting a thicker skin, you know.

00:23:09.020 If you're a gay male, it's hard to grow up.

00:23:16.700 It's hard to go through high school.

00:23:17.920 You have to be prepared to take a lot of teasing from other guys.

00:23:22.740 And so then if you get into the corporate world and people are, like, making fun of your PowerPoint,

00:23:28.960 like, it's not that big a deal compared to the teasing that you've already suffered.

00:23:33.560 So that's fascinating. 0.85

00:23:35.220 So in a way, gay men are actually tougher a lot of the time than straight men. 0.93

00:23:40.040 I think so.

00:23:40.760 I think emotionally and in terms of having a strong sense of their identity.

00:23:48.580 The 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.

00:24:00.380 There's a crisis of masculinity. 0.91

00:24:02.620 most straight men are terrified of being called, you know, toxically masculine. And so a lot of

00:24:10.840 guys don't know how to behave, unless they're gay. The gay guys know how to behave. Straight guys 1.00

00:24:15.640 don't. But you said there's a crisis of masculinity. What does that mean? Because I hear this a lot on

00:24:21.220 Twitter and all the rest of it. Why do you think there's a crisis of masculinity? I think partly

00:24:26.040 it's an engineered crisis. I think partly it's an intentionally designed crisis from gender feminism, 0.98

00:24:31.300 which is to take away all the traditional sources of masculine virtue and meaning and to say those

00:24:40.080 are invalid, right? Being a traditional hunter archetype or warrior archetype is no longer valid.

00:24:48.920 You're not allowed to do that. And men are like, well, what are we allowed to do in the gender 0.98

00:24:53.540 feministically. Not our problem. We don't give a shit. That's what you say. And partly it's a 1.00

00:25:03.380 crisis that's created by the sort of legal atmosphere, the Me Too movement, the terror

00:25:09.040 of being accused of sexual harassment or stalking or coercion. Partly it's the feminized psychotherapy

00:25:17.560 movement where, you know, if men are having trouble in a relationship and they go to a

00:25:22.500 therapist, which will usually be a woman. It'll be a kind of two-on-one, you know, women beating 1.00

00:25:30.260 up a guy emotionally, saying, everything you want and believe and desire is illegitimate.

00:25:38.140 And you have to change to be more like us. So I think part of the crisis is from my own field, 0.92

00:25:46.400 psychology. We were talking about this before you got here with Francis. And, you know, I

00:25:52.260 I 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.

00:26:03.420 And we were talking about just Jordan Peterson.

00:26:06.760 The number one question that I see him being asked every single interview is, most of your following is male.

00:26:13.800 And then they go into a question.

00:26:15.700 And the only way you would ask that question, I think, is if you thought there was something wrong with being male.

00:26:23.560 Because 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.

00:26:33.220 Yeah.

00:26:33.500 So do you think we live in a society now that increasingly essentially thinks that men are bad at some level?

00:26:38.840 Absolutely.

00:26:39.780 Absolutely.

00:26:40.520 Yeah.

00:26:40.680 Yeah. The whole concept of patriarchy says, you know, the last few thousand years of civilization

00:26:47.960 where, like, all this amazing stuff was invented and economic growth, like, took off and we're

00:26:53.720 a thousandfold richer than our ancestors and life is a hundred times better. That's all patriarchy

00:27:00.240 and that's all due to the oppression of women and colonialism. And men get no credit for any of that,

00:27:08.600 even though it was mostly men working on it at the sort of cutting edge of invention.

00:27:16.620 And so basically the last few thousand years of civilization has been rejected, right?

00:27:26.620 And everything bad that happened is sort of put on men, and men are told, 0.96

00:27:33.600 yeah, you're basically the evil sex. 1.00

00:27:35.280 there's a possibility of redemption 0.99

00:27:38.340 which is offered by gender feminism 1.00

00:27:40.420 which says

00:27:41.360 if you just become more like women 0.99

00:27:43.480 everything will be okay

00:27:45.300 the way you're saying it

00:27:48.560 sounds so soothing though

00:27:49.760 I'm like yes

00:27:51.280 that's what I need to do

00:27:52.640 I need to become more like a woman

00:27:54.080 see this is why everyone's transitioning

00:27:55.520 so the thing is

00:27:59.400 just to try and explore the counter argument

00:28:02.040 which we always try and do on the show

00:28:03.440 a lot of bad things has happened over the last two, three thousand years. There have been a lot

00:28:08.620 of, you know, colonialism was, there were elements of it, which were very bad, right?

00:28:14.540 I think it's indisputable that for a long time, we did live in a very unfair society that treated

00:28:19.980 both minorities and women badly. I think no one would dispute that. I'm sure you wouldn't, 1.00

00:28:25.460 right? So it was an argument to say, well, you know, there's excesses to this kind of extreme

00:28:31.500 forms of feminism. But overall, it's a good movement. We do need to move towards as much 1.00

00:28:36.660 equality of opportunity as we possibly can. And this is part of that. And yes, there are elements

00:28:42.040 of masculinity that are toxic. Therefore, we need to keep going. Otherwise, men will be oppressing 0.80

00:28:46.800 women once again. Yeah. So I'm all for what you could call classical liberal feminism. My mom was 1.00

00:28:55.620 a 70s feminist. She did a lot of organizing with a group called League of Women Voters, 1.00

00:29:01.560 which in America helps get women out to vote and promotes female candidates and organizes

00:29:07.480 political debates. And so my mom was a big deal in that local group. But her view was,

00:29:14.560 we just want equal rights. We want the right to participate in political life and occupations

00:29:21.600 and careers and education, and they were fairly non-theoretical, like they didn't have a strong

00:29:28.360 gender feminist explanation of society. They just took a practical approach that said,

00:29:35.900 if women participate more in business and life and politics, then all of those places 1.00

00:29:42.220 will become friendlier to women and represent women's interests better. And then I think

00:29:48.680 African feminism got derailed in the 80s. 0.89

00:29:52.140 I think what happened is you get the rise of academic feminism and they're like, well, 0.99

00:29:58.440 the Equal Rights Amendment didn't pass in the 70s in America.

00:30:02.240 What do we do now? 1.00

00:30:03.240 Let's theorize about shit. 1.00

00:30:05.720 Let's write books about the patriarchy. 1.00

00:30:07.900 Let's write books about how terrible men are.

00:30:11.500 And that's where I think it went wrong.

00:30:14.120 they kind of got into the business of like this weird combination of ideology and activism

00:30:20.280 and scholarship and sort of public outreach that said, no matter how much progress women

00:30:28.720 make in equal rights, nothing will ever change as long as the underlying systemic blah, blah,

00:30:35.820 blah, patriarchy is intact.

00:30:37.720 So we have to overthrow all of society all at once.

00:30:42.180 Good luck with that.

00:30:44.120 And then everything will be, you know, beautiful and equal.

00:30:49.660 And I think that project has been a catastrophic failure

00:30:52.680 and is actually worse than sort of the 1920s suffragettes

00:30:58.520 or the 1970s women's rights movement.

00:31:01.920 And what effect do you think this movement has on men in particular?

00:31:06.920 Because I can see, you know, sometimes men who being,

00:31:11.640 I don't really like using the word radicalized.

00:31:14.000 I think it's a wrong, but I don't know another term to use when they get confronted by this

00:31:18.920 type of thought where people just say your very existence is an affront to my life almost.

00:31:26.940 I think there's two basic responses.

00:31:29.080 If you ever are in a member of a group where you're again and again and again accused of

00:31:34.520 being evil just because you're in the group, and this will be true whether it's a sex or

00:31:39.960 race or religion or a political party or football team supporter, whatever, two responses are

00:31:49.200 you either like back off and you sort of shut up about it and you self-censor, or in this

00:31:56.480 case, you kind of self-castrate, right?

00:31:58.800 Like you disavow the elements of masculinity that they're critiquing. 0.99

00:32:04.600 Or you lean forward and you're like, fuck you, I'm going to assert my masculinity. 0.99

00:32:08.140 I'm going to go full red pill 1.00

00:32:10.240 I'm going to start reading

00:32:11.760 first Jordan Peterson

00:32:14.120 and then the pickup artist guys

00:32:16.720 Rolo Tomasi, whatever

00:32:18.140 and I'm going to get radicalized

00:32:20.240 in the Reddit communities

00:32:22.560 and that's

00:32:24.800 both of those responses I think

00:32:26.720 are sad

00:32:28.840 and counterproductive

00:32:29.740 deeply unhealthy as well

00:32:31.020 because the self-castrating guys

00:32:33.540 who are like I hate my masculinity 0.88

00:32:35.980 I hate it 0.82

00:32:37.320 Like, oh, man, that's sad.

00:32:40.200 Like, that's a recipe for depression and alienation and mating failure.

00:32:45.980 Because women are not attracted to that at all. 0.97

00:32:48.020 Women are not attracted to people who hate themselves.

00:32:51.420 Weird.

00:32:54.020 And then the guys who go full red pill but not in a smart way, right, can get so belligerent 0.99

00:33:01.460 and spend so much time fighting other red pill guys and becoming such assholes and turning 0.97

00:33:07.680 into trolls that, A, that's not very attractive either. 0.99

00:33:13.020 B, it's kind of hard to have a happy life if you sort of go around, in a way, hating 0.78

00:33:19.360 women and blaming them for everything. 1.00

00:33:22.460 So what I hope is that evolutionary psychology offers kind of a reasonable middle ground 0.98

00:33:27.400 where you can assert your masculinity without being a dick about it.

00:33:35.700 I think that's so important, and that's why we're grateful that you've come and talked to us, 0.64

00:33:40.160 because I think these issues need to be talked about, because that polarization that we see in

00:33:44.700 politics, which I want to get onto in a second, it's happening in society as well. It's happening

00:33:49.420 between men and women too. And like you say, people are either chopping their balls off, 0.99

00:33:54.180 essentially, metaphorically, or they're becoming assholes, genuinely misogynistic assholes. And 1.00

00:33:59.500 you see it online all the time. And that helps no one because, you know, I've always said this,

00:34:04.640 like historically, the two groups of people who've always needed to stick together more than anyone

00:34:08.880 is men and women. That's the two groups of people that have needed to cooperate throughout history

00:34:13.840 more than anyone, right? Yeah. And if you take a step back from it and you ask,

00:34:20.460 whose interests are really served, right, by alienating men from women and vice versa 0.96

00:34:28.120 and creating this like weird little proxy war between the sexes, I think the answer is it's

00:34:36.520 not really in the interests of either sex. I think it's in the interests of kind of in a way the

00:34:43.360 corporate and political powers that be in the elites and it's a kind of divide and conquer,

00:34:47.920 I 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. 0.96

00:35:01.660 I think also at a marketing level, it helps sell shit because it creates profound insecurity in both sexes. 0.99

00:35:11.940 You know, guys are like, I don't know what masculinity means anymore, so I better buy some more shit just in case. 0.99

00:35:17.920 And the same thing happens with women. So I think if we could take a step back from this battle of 1.00

00:35:26.040 the sexes and ask, you know, who's really profiting from it? Obviously, the political 1.00

00:35:32.240 parties in America are profiting from it. I don't know to what extent that's also true here.

00:35:37.480 But if you also have kind of sexually polarized politics, then, man, people just take more

00:35:44.500 interest in politics, because everyone's interested in their sex and their relationships

00:35:50.680 and gender issues, and if you can politicize that, man, that gets out the vote, that gets

00:35:59.820 people passionate about a lot of political issues.

00:36:05.880 And I think we're all being kind of manipulated by that.

00:36:11.680 What 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?

00:36:23.600 Do you think somebody's there making a conscious choice or there's a group of people making that choice?

00:36:30.280 I think there's a group of kind of cynical journalists who track, you know, what pieces get reactions, right?

00:36:37.800 And it's mostly kind of the online journalism world, Vox.com or whatever.

00:36:45.600 And 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.

00:36:58.840 But I think they noted that that is a direction you can go.

00:37:02.900 Like that gets clicks.

00:37:04.480 That gets a response.

00:37:05.880 and so I think it's kind of marketing driven I don't think there's a group of

00:37:13.380 people kind of meeting in a New York hotel in secret kind of like how can we

00:37:18.120 make men and women hate each other and then rule society I don't think it's

00:37:21.720 that I think it's a response to the kind of the combination of men and women not

00:37:31.260 really knowing what their sexuality should look like in the 21st century, and the social

00:37:39.180 media and social media journalism kind of exploiting that insecurity.

00:37:45.180 And then the political operators and pollsters and campaign managers kind of noticing, oh,

00:37:52.440 this is an area where we can get traction.

00:37:55.560 People are really interested in this.

00:37:57.300 Do 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?

00:38:12.320 Well, 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.

00:38:34.380 I think that can help. It really only reaches the minority of people who care about kind of

00:38:39.920 articulating ideas and learning about stuff. I think the thing that would make it go more

00:38:46.760 mainstream would be sort of public figures. I mean, Jordan Peterson is kind of straddling this

00:38:53.940 at the moment. He's got kind of one foot in intellectual dark web, but one foot in the kind

00:38:59.160 of Tony Robbins self-help mass movement thing. And I'm all for that. I think that's awesome.

00:39:05.700 That's what I was trying to do with my mate book a few years ago, frankly.

00:39:09.620 But I think what you need more is maybe, I don't know, celebrity couples going on camera together

00:39:16.100 and kind of explaining, here's how we manage this in our relationship. Here's our power dynamics.

00:39:23.980 Here's what we do. Take it or leave it. If it works for you, great, imitate it.

00:39:28.540 Or even better, here's what we learned from this other power couple.

00:39:34.480 I think you have to personalize it.

00:39:36.860 And this is one reason why my girlfriend Diana Fleischman and I have been doing interviews together,

00:39:43.040 is 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.

00:39:53.540 And I think that can be quite healing at the kind of political and ideological level.

00:40:00.540 I wish more people did do that.

00:40:02.100 One of the things we found in this country, for example, Theresa May, the prime minister,

00:40:06.180 I think when she first became prime minister, do you remember this, Francis?

00:40:08.620 She came out and said that in their relationship with her husband, they have girl jobs and boy jobs.

00:40:14.380 There's certain things that she does, and he takes out the rubbish, for example, right?

00:40:18.560 And she got a ton of criticism for that.

00:40:22.100 She probably got more criticism for that than for the decisions that she made as Home Secretary about immigration or whatever. 0.99

00:40:28.560 You know what I mean?

00:40:29.860 So I think it's going to take a lot of people doing what you are doing and other people.

00:40:35.660 Francis, when we become a celebrity couple.

00:40:37.540 Yeah, we should do. 0.83

00:40:38.600 And I do like the fact that Diana thought you were gay. 0.65

00:40:41.120 Yeah.

00:40:42.140 Thank you for bringing that up again.

00:40:44.100 That still offends him as a Russian.

00:40:46.760 He can't get over his programming.

00:40:48.480 me. There was one thing that I wanted to talk to you about moving slightly on, and it's about

00:40:53.520 marketing. And it's about how marketing companies use our evolutionary tendencies in order to

00:41:01.960 manipulate us, in order to get us to consume. Would you just be able to go into that a little

00:41:05.700 bit? Yeah. So about 10 years ago, I wrote a book called Spent, Sex, Evolution, and Consumer

00:41:11.320 behavior. And it was about, why do we buy goods and services, really? The usual explanation from

00:41:20.180 economics is, oh, goods and services deliver utility and pleasure and value and happiness to

00:41:25.040 us. And that's why. And like, that's good. That makes sense for certain things like whatever,

00:41:31.080 pizza. But it doesn't make sense of a lot of other aspects of consumption. Like, why does anyone buy

00:41:38.580 a Bugatti Veyron 1,200 horsepower sports car

00:41:42.500 when you could buy a Honda Civic

00:41:45.140 and get around London just as quickly, actually?

00:41:48.060 Or, you know, why do you spend 200 quid

00:41:52.000 on a fine restaurant dinner on a first date

00:41:54.800 instead of just going down to Nando's Chicken or whatever?

00:41:59.900 So I wanted to understand kind of conspicuous consumption,

00:42:04.740 But also I wanted to understand things like educational credentialism, college degrees.

00:42:11.320 Why do we want to get the Oxbridge degree so we can brag about it?

00:42:17.940 Or why do we prefer taking dates to live comedy rather than just sitting at home and watching Netflix stand-up specials?

00:42:26.260 So my solution to that was, well, we want to advertise certain virtues and traits that we have to others around us,

00:42:33.280 particularly mates and friends. And certain goods and services are really good for kind of

00:42:40.020 advertising certain traits that we have. Like an educational credential advertises intelligence.

00:42:46.860 Going to an edgy live comedy performance advertises openness, right? Because you never know what the

00:42:54.280 comic's going to talk about on stage. So you have to be the kind of person who can kind of roll with

00:43:00.180 And a highly traditionalist conservative person is not going to go see, you know, an Anthony Jeselnik comedy show.

00:43:10.060 I mean, they might by accident.

00:43:13.080 That would probably be funnier than any comedy show.

00:43:14.980 Suddenly though for a second time anyway, yeah. 0.99

00:43:17.240 Once they're there with the date, it'll be like, oh, this guy's a psychopath. 0.97

00:43:22.300 I don't know. So it was trying to understand what I think a lot of marketers already know,

00:43:28.540 but don't say, which is that they're not really selling the thing they think they're selling.

00:43:33.580 They're selling an ability for this person to advertise this trait to these other people

00:43:39.720 through the product. Wow. So in a sense, what we're really doing when we're just buying anything

00:43:48.920 is with displaying signals.

00:43:50.780 Yeah, it's all signals.

00:43:53.000 I mean, there's been a sort of gold rush to use signaling theory

00:43:57.500 to explain a lot of aspects of human behavior the last few years.

00:44:01.600 I've been doing it, Robin Hanson with the elephant in the brain

00:44:06.460 has been doing it.

00:44:07.380 A lot of people suddenly are talking not just about virtue signaling

00:44:11.880 in politics or Twitter, but just signaling in general.

00:44:15.800 And it's great because I think signaling really explains a lot.

00:44:21.300 And I think even Darwin in the 1870s understood signaling explains a lot.

00:44:28.300 So what about tattoos?

00:44:30.420 Because that's something I really wanted to ask.

00:44:32.440 Because before tattoos were seen as something you did if you were a social priori convict.

00:44:36.620 But now, I mean, I've got one.

00:44:37.980 But why do we tattoo now?

00:44:39.840 I still see that, right, mate.

00:44:42.920 That's a good question.

00:44:43.940 And 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.

00:44:58.900 So I've watched way more hours of Ink Master than I would want to admit.

00:45:04.060 And I don't have any tattoos, but I do at least appreciate the artistry and the culture and the different styles.

00:45:11.260 and how much it means to someone to kind of make a permanent commitment to, like, this is part of my identity.

00:45:21.020 This is a significant event in my life.

00:45:23.440 This is an important person in my life.

00:45:26.120 And I'm going to just seize it as part of my persona and display it so everyone can see it.

00:45:37.420 I think there's a kind of admirable courage in that.

00:45:40.060 But 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.

00:45:54.900 So 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.

00:46:03.800 It's like a tweet you can't delete.

00:46:05.380 Yeah.

00:46:06.240 A tattoo is the undeletable tweet.

00:46:08.800 Yeah.

00:46:09.280 Yeah.

00:46:09.420 Yeah. 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?

00:46:30.420 I think for a lot of men, it's a search for authentic masculinity.

00:46:37.680 And I lived in New York in 2013 when I was teaching at the business school there, and

00:46:44.340 I dated a woman who lived in the sort of epicenter of Brooklyn hipster culture. 0.89

00:46:50.800 So I got very, very familiar with hipster culture.

00:46:54.020 And I kind of loved it.

00:46:55.400 I loved the respect for the past and the sort of sense of connection to like dads and granddads 0.63

00:47:04.620 and doing the same kind of shit that they did and going to the same kind of barbers

00:47:10.380 and like, and buying things that were intended to last, not just till next fashion season, 0.99

00:47:17.160 but for like, for decades.

00:47:19.920 So I really appreciated that sort of sense of temporal continuity.

00:47:25.400 But the attention to quality and craftsmanship and the sort of artisanal this and artisanal

00:47:35.860 that, like I actually thought this is better than the throwaway, hyper-consumerist culture

00:47:41.180 that you saw before, like in the 80s.

00:47:46.520 At the time, I kind of appreciated the overlap between the hipster culture, the CrossFit

00:47:51.160 culture, the paleo movement, which I was involved in.

00:47:53.880 And, but I thought fundamentally, at least for the men, it really was about a sort of

00:48:01.400 pushing back against the gender feminization of men. 0.61

00:48:08.000 And it was sort of saying, I'm going to grow a beard, goddammit, and wear boots and be

00:48:13.780 strong and be decisive about what kind of artisanal bacon I order for lunch and whatever.

00:48:21.240 and i had a lot of respect for that and i guess in a way it informed writing the mate book

00:48:27.640 which was sort of dating advice for young guys not an explicitly hipster book but

00:48:33.880 um it kind of took lessons from that that movement so your face is the one place you're

00:48:40.380 still allowed to be a man just just just down here uh listen we've got about oh no i was just

00:48:45.380 going to ask a quick question because you know when i was in my 20s i really struggled with

00:48:50.740 identity and finding

00:48:53.720 someone and you know and

00:48:55.300 dating it's just awful it's just

00:48:57.500 horrible and then we met

00:48:59.500 and then we met

00:49:00.220 and we've been

00:49:03.360 loving ever since can you see the look of discomfort

00:49:05.820 on each side

00:49:06.580 but if you've got some tips

00:49:09.340 for men who are looking you know

00:49:11.580 and they want to meet someone they want to display

00:49:13.780 a value and they want to

00:49:15.520 you know attract a mate what's the

00:49:17.260 five easy ways for instance of displaying

00:49:19.480 value, for instance? Buy and read my mate book. We cover a lot of this also in the Mating Grounds

00:49:26.240 podcast, which is online and free and whatever. But I would say the main things are, number one,

00:49:34.880 get physically strong. Do things that will make you physically strong. Lift heavy things. Number

00:49:40.940 to wear clothes that fit and get advice from women and other men about how to do that,

00:49:50.900 you wouldn't believe...like, if I get on any given London overground train and look at

00:49:57.560 what the guys are wearing, my eyes are bleeding.

00:50:02.620 How is anyone with two X chromosomes supposed to look at that and go,

00:50:06.500 mm, yeah.

00:50:15.040 Jeffrey Miller destroys British men.

00:50:17.980 Yeah, that would be the clip, Jeffrey. 0.69

00:50:20.400 British male taste is substantially better than Albuquerque male taste.

00:50:24.540 I will say that.

00:50:29.240 And I think what else?

00:50:32.620 Read 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. 0.99

00:50:46.940 I 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.

00:50:56.400 But I think, like, pay attention to how you're allocating your leisure time. 0.92

00:51:02.060 And if you're allocating your leisure time in a way that builds you up into a more interesting person, women will notice eventually.

00:51:10.780 And you'll feel better about yourself and more confident about approaching women.

00:51:16.960 And then finally, online dating is awesome.

00:51:19.300 And just find an online dating app that actually lets you showcase what is good about yourself.

00:51:26.400 If you look awesome, then Tinder is great.

00:51:30.540 But if you don't look awesome, find some other dating app other than Tinder

00:51:34.840 that lets you share more of your intelligence and creativity

00:51:40.160 and verbal skills and humor and whatever.

00:51:44.460 So, yeah, that's my dating app.

00:51:45.600 Train your body, train your brain.

00:51:47.360 Listen to trigonometry.

00:51:48.420 Listen to trigonometry.

00:51:49.140 Absolutely.

00:51:49.920 That's right.

00:51:50.300 Well, listen, before we've got about 10 minutes, let's talk politics a little bit.

00:51:56.400 I'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.

00:52:08.760 And that strikes me, like I see that instinct within myself to find the tribe and to go, oh, this is what I am.

00:52:17.400 Everyone else is evil. Fight, fight, fight.

00:52:19.620 And I have to resist that urge within myself.

00:52:22.380 But I think a lot of us, we don't do that.

00:52:25.420 we just dive in, we start attacking other people. So where are we? How are we there? What is it

00:52:31.820 about us as human beings that makes us that way? And how can we depolarize ourselves?

00:52:37.080 I think one important thing to remember is that when humans were evolving for the last couple

00:52:41.520 million years, we were very often in contact with other hominids, other bipedal hominids 0.99

00:52:48.480 running around on two legs with pretty big brains who were different species or different subspecies

00:52:54.720 who were literally not us, like they weren't us, they were competing with us.

00:53:01.820 And we get kind of confused because we're the last hominid standing.

00:53:06.100 Like we out-competed all of them and they went extinct.

00:53:09.400 Some of them we poached some of their genes like the Neanderthals or the Denisovans or

00:53:15.280 you know, whatever.

00:53:17.560 But we didn't evolve in a kind of multicultural kumbaya kind of setting where everyone

00:53:24.700 not along right we evolved to compete against other beings that kind of looked like us and kind

00:53:34.340 of didn't and where we weren't probably not very nice to them and not very welcoming that's another

00:53:41.700 statement right there jeffrey so we probably killed them brutally let's be probably we killed 0.55

00:53:49.560 them really but we probably also just kind of out competed them and like we got this cave and 0.99

00:53:53.640 they didn't get the cave and there they are freezing to death and we don't give a shit. 0.97

00:53:59.300 So one level, it's absolutely astonishing that you can have a multicultural city like modern 1.00

00:54:05.740 London with millions of people from hundreds of countries and not have massive like ethnic 1.00

00:54:12.500 riots all the time. It's amazing we can achieve that. That's not something that could have been

00:54:18.660 predicted maybe 500 years ago. So I think when people go, oh no, we're so partisan and racist

00:54:27.100 and xenophobic, it's like, compared to what? Compared to what standard? Compared to angels,

00:54:33.240 maybe? Compared to what you would have expected given our evolutionary history? It's astonishing

00:54:39.380 that multicultural societies work as well as they do. And they don't work perfectly, 1.00

00:54:45.520 and maybe they're not optimal. But, you know, the evolutionary perspective lets you

00:54:52.380 just give people a little bit of credit for things being as peaceful as they are.

00:55:01.140 Well, it's not just the evolutionary perspective. For me, someone who comes from Russia as an

00:55:04.620 immigrant to this country, first generation, the perspective of having lived in places outside of

00:55:09.560 Western Europe and North America, it teaches you very quickly about how tolerant and welcoming

00:55:15.660 and accepting and not homophobic and all the rest of it this country is or this part of the world

00:55:21.980 is. And I think we've definitely lost the sense of just like, what are we comparing to? Absolutely.

00:55:28.700 But I think there is no question that our societies are now more divided than they have

00:55:33.040 been for a while. Not ever, of course, that's ridiculous, but than they have been for a while.

00:55:36.740 In 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. 0.91

00:55:48.540 It's just not going to happen, is it?

00:55:50.060 Yeah.

00:55:50.440 And that's how predictable it's become, right?

00:55:53.920 So 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?

00:56:06.740 Yeah. 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.

00:56:23.120 And 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.

00:56:40.700 And there's, like, nothing wrong with that.

00:56:43.100 That's the historical norm.

00:56:46.780 And it's quite...

00:56:48.180 Sorry to interrupt.

00:56:49.300 Is that the position you're advocating?

00:56:50.740 i think it's a thing that's worth experimenting with i think a lot of people would be troubled

00:56:57.240 by that i know certainly yeah well they can be troubled by it and they can they can form their

00:57:01.900 own community where they can get together and be troubled by it but is there not an argument for

00:57:06.600 a nation uh jeffrey the idea that we are all let's say british right we all come to this country we

00:57:12.760 all integrate we all talk to one another uh we all understand we all have a common set of values

00:57:18.100 we maybe have a national service where we all go and meet people from different ethnic groups and

00:57:22.600 whatever. I know a lot of people, one of our recent guests, Peter Hitchens, talked about the

00:57:27.000 fact that one of the problems with mass immigration is that people don't integrate and then everyone

00:57:32.080 lives in their own ghetto. And I certainly would, as someone who is an immigrant, I would be

00:57:36.840 troubled if there was a Russian ghetto of 100,000 Russians in the center of London. I would be 1.00

00:57:42.300 troubled by that. Or as it's otherwise called Mayfair. But that's a very particular thing,

00:57:48.120 right? So I would be very worried about living in a society where essentially we all became our

00:57:53.200 own little tribe that lived in its own little place. And I don't see that as still being a

00:57:59.300 nation, really. Right. So what you need is, if you're going to have a nation at all, right,

00:58:06.340 it's either got to be an ethnostate where it's sort of defined by ethnicity, or it's got to be

00:58:11.400 civic nationalism, where it's defined by shared language, values, education, mass media,

00:58:20.000 everybody buying into the same criminal justice system and the same norms for how the sexes 0.99

00:58:27.520 relate and how the mating market operates and all of that. And you can totally have civic

00:58:32.100 nationalism. That can succeed. It succeeded okay in America and in Britain. What you can't have

00:58:39.460 is a nation where it's fake civic nationalism, where you give lip service to civic nationalism,

00:58:46.560 but you don't actually have integration. If it's like, welcome to Britain, you don't have to learn

00:58:53.280 English. Welcome to Britain, you don't have to respect our criminal justice system. Welcome to

00:58:58.620 Britain, you don't actually have to join our educational system. I think that's a recipe for

00:59:03.220 catastrophe. Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people, that's why I wanted to clarify what you

00:59:07.460 said because a lot of people would have heard you saying that and I think a lot of people would be

00:59:13.320 troubled by that as I am I'm troubled by that you know I'm troubled by that I think we do need

00:59:17.320 a genuine civic nationalism where we all have it there are some values that everybody understands

00:59:23.120 as being British values we all buy into that and unfortunately that's not the direction that we

00:59:27.660 seem to be going in you know even saying that seems to be oh you're racist somehow you know

00:59:32.780 the idea that we should all have a common set of values or a common language or you know whatever

00:59:36.900 But 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.

00:59:48.900 It's not typical of most nation states throughout history.

00:59:53.220 It's also not typical of most nation states currently around the world, right?

00:59:59.800 China is a Han Chinese ethnostate, right? 1.00

01:00:03.040 It's more than 95% Han Chinese.

01:00:05.180 They have no interest in making it into a civic national state.

01:00:10.480 That's not their goal.

01:00:11.960 They're not going to be like, we love Russians. 1.00

01:00:14.760 Come live with us, Russians. 1.00

01:00:16.020 That's not going to happen.

01:00:17.620 So it remains to be seen in the coming decades how does their model of a kind of technocratic,

01:00:27.660 long-term thinking, slightly despotic ethnostate, how well does that play out

01:00:33.720 compared to, let's say, multicultural British civic nationalism.

01:00:38.920 Do I hear you suggesting that they're probably more competitive as a system?

01:00:46.440 Well, who's going to colonize Mars first? China, obviously. 0.98

01:00:52.060 Who's going to nominate the world in terms of soft power? China, I think, obviously.

01:00:57.500 So, 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. 0.91

01:01:23.960 and in a way I'm sort of more interested in what they do long term

01:01:30.880 than what happens in Britain or America.

01:01:34.760 Well, just to stick for a second with what's happening in Britain or America

01:01:38.320 before we go to our final question,

01:01:40.340 I wanted to talk to you about free speech

01:01:42.280 because it's something that you are passionate about.

01:01:44.500 It's something you've spoken about.

01:01:45.640 I think you kind of really started speaking out

01:01:48.020 when the James D'Amour thing happened.

01:01:50.400 And we've had some experience with this in the UK.

01:01:54.960 But talking about free speech on campus in America, tell us what's happening there.

01:01:59.800 Because we watch it from here.

01:02:01.420 We hear about people being platformed, violence on campuses, all of this stuff.

01:02:07.880 Because you have that enshrined in your constitution as a very kind of important principle of your civilization almost, right?

01:02:15.280 What is happening with free speech in the United States, particularly on campuses?

01:02:19.840 The situation is getting a little better, but very, very slowly.

01:02:22.700 I think five years ago was probably peak censorship in terms of almost nobody respecting free speech

01:02:31.580 rights.

01:02:33.140 I've been involved in my university and faculty senate.

01:02:35.640 I kept trying to pass resolutions saying, we are a public university.

01:02:40.260 Technically, we are an arm of the state.

01:02:42.340 We are a part of the federal government.

01:02:44.420 We are not obeying the constitution.

01:02:47.980 Here's a dozen policies that violate the First Amendment.

01:02:51.380 other senators would be like, so what? We don't give a shit. Free speech is an outdated medieval 0.99

01:02:56.580 concept. Medieval. Yeah, there was loads of free speech in medieval times. Yeah.

01:03:05.780 So when Trump came out a couple of weeks ago and said, I'd like to do an executive order that says

01:03:11.520 man, if you're in a public university and you do not follow First Amendment free speech principles,

01:03:17.380 I will cut off federal funding. I was like, yay, this is what we need. I've been advocating that

01:03:23.060 for two years. That is the only thing that will get administrators to take free speech seriously.

01:03:29.740 Nothing else will, I know, because I've tried it. And then, sadly, some of my free speech

01:03:35.220 colleagues were like, this is terrible. This is top down. We can't have this associated with

01:03:40.060 Trump. And are you guys kidding? If Obama had done this, if Obama had said, respect free speech or I

01:03:48.360 cut funding, everybody would be going, yay. At least the pro free speech left. So I think

01:03:55.460 I'm guardedly optimistic that Trump might follow through on this. I hope if he does an executive

01:04:02.280 order that it's well written and that it fits constitutional law. I hope that universities

01:04:09.120 will react to it by saying, fuck, you're right. We were bad. We were bad. And we're going to 1.00

01:04:16.940 try to, you know, play nice according to the Constitution. My worry is it'll just create

01:04:23.300 more polarization and people will be like, fuck you, Trump. We're not going to do any of this. 1.00

01:04:32.720 and because there's a lot of people who believe that you know free speech like you said is a

01:04:39.340 cover for hate speech can you just articulate and as somebody whose mother comes from Venezuela I

01:04:43.940 can't believe I'm asking this question but why is free speech on campus and outside so important

01:04:49.120 I'm sorry for the question but I have to ask it free speech is important generally because we

01:04:56.200 should all be humble about what we know and what we believe and open to changing our minds

01:05:00.240 And 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.

01:05:12.600 You need to actually have a rough and tumble, like radically honest conversation in society.

01:05:20.580 Now, the trouble is, that actually depends on the infrastructure of civic nationalism.

01:05:26.860 It actually depends on people knowing a common language, having some common values, having some common historical education.

01:05:34.960 And some common sense.

01:05:35.820 And some common sense.

01:05:36.900 And we don't have that.

01:05:39.180 And then the second part is why is free speech so important on campuses is campuses are the point of ideological indoctrination in America.

01:05:49.480 That's where you learn the proper views that you're supposed to have.

01:05:53.760 and the left has understood this since the late 60s, right?

01:06:00.440 They realized we're in a culture war.

01:06:02.440 We win the culture war by taking over K-12 education and higher education 0.99

01:06:07.960 and indoctrinating people to have certain values

01:06:10.240 and telling them certain other values are beyond the pale.

01:06:14.000 And they succeeded.

01:06:15.380 They won that culture war.

01:06:18.140 And the only way to win it back is, A, advocate free speech,

01:06:23.320 and, B, make better arguments.

01:06:26.280 Well, speaking of free speech and making better arguments,

01:06:29.380 it's been a great interview, Jeffrey.

01:06:31.400 And our last question always is,

01:06:33.560 what's the one thing that no one's talking about

01:06:35.480 that we ought to be talking about?

01:06:41.360 Well, I got in this effective altruism movement

01:06:45.020 about five years ago.

01:06:47.100 I teach a course on it.

01:06:48.500 And I think the thing that used to frighten the crap out of me was artificial intelligence.

01:06:56.760 But the last year or so, the thing that more frightens the crap out of me is what always 0.66

01:07:01.120 frightened the crap out of me in college, nuclear war.

01:07:05.060 Nuclear war is still the biggest existential risk that humanity faces.

01:07:10.120 Nuclear winter is a much stronger risk than climate change, right?

01:07:15.400 What is climate change?

01:07:16.440 oh no, the climate might get two or three degrees hotter.

01:07:20.440 Nuclear winter is like, oh no,

01:07:22.980 the climate might be 20 or 30 degrees cooler.

01:07:26.920 That's a bigger risk.

01:07:28.820 And so what I don't see politicians and citizens doing

01:07:32.720 is talking seriously about,

01:07:34.920 there are still a lot of nukes.

01:07:37.360 They're still out there.

01:07:38.620 We just had India and Pakistan almost escalate into that. 0.98

01:07:43.240 China has nukes, Russia has nukes, this is still a live issue, but it's almost like,

01:07:51.300 oh, we're bored. We're bored with nuclear war, man. We've all seen the Terminator movies,

01:07:56.780 and that's so 20th century to worry about that. I think we could be blindsided by it, right? We

01:08:03.780 don't want to be in a situation where we go, oh, shit, we lost our species and our civilization 0.99

01:08:09.240 because we got bored with the biggest existential risk. 0.98

01:08:12.500 And we kind of moved on to this relatively minor X risk

01:08:17.800 like climate change or bioterrorism or AI.

01:08:22.400 So that's the thing people aren't talking about.

01:08:26.320 And I highly recommend the book,

01:08:28.680 The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg

01:08:30.920 that talks about just the nearly continually catastrophic

01:08:36.420 bad nuclear strategy that the U.S. had throughout the Cold War

01:08:40.840 that almost blew us up over and over and over and over again.

01:08:45.560 So that deserves more attention, I think.

01:08:49.880 Fantastic, Jeffrey.

01:08:50.720 Well, thank you for coming on.

01:08:52.160 If you enjoyed this interview, follow Jeffrey on Twitter at Primal Poly

01:08:56.180 by his book, The Mating Mind.

01:08:57.980 You've got other books as well, haven't you?

01:08:59.620 Spent and Mate.

01:09:01.180 Spent and Mate.

01:09:02.720 And the podcast, remind us of the podcast.

01:09:04.640 Oh, The Mating Grounds.

01:09:05.700 The Mating Grounds.

01:09:06.420 follow us as always

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01:09:30.920 alright guys

01:09:31.680 thanks very much

01:09:32.280 we'll see you in a week's time

01:09:33.060 see you later

01:09:33.540 bye bye

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TRIGGERnometry - April 07, 2019

Geoffrey Miller on Sex Differences, Masculinity & Political Polarisation

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