Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Why We’re Divided” with Jon Yates

Transcript

“Why We’re Divided” with Jon Yates · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans! Welcome to the Safe Space for dangerous ideas. Why are we all coming apart
• 0:07
  at the seams? Why does it seem like politics is getting more fractious? The media is getting
• 0:12
  more hostile, more and more little tribes, and fiefdoms are becoming more out of touch
• 0:17
  with each other in these big societies of ours. Is that just an illusion or is it actually
• 0:22
  happening? Today's guest understands more about this than most people do. He's written a book
• 0:26
  about it, and he'll explain what's happening to us, how we can fix it, what it all has to do
• 0:31
  with President Eisenhower and the Battle of the Bulge, what it has to do with Sri Lanka's civil war,
• 0:37
  what it has to do with the founder of Singapore, it's a fascinating conversation,
• 0:41
  John Yates is a delightful intellectual, sometimes stand up comic, therefore he's a very funny
• 0:46
  and interesting and entertaining person to talk to as well as being insightful. He's the co-founder
• 0:51
  of several charities, he was the lead policy advisor to the British Education Secretary,
• 0:57
  he now leads the Youth Endowment Fund, which is a charity that studies how to reduce
• 1:02
  violence, but really his main sphere of interest is writing about the divisions between us
• 1:07
  and how we build a more united society. His new book, his first book is called Fractured,
• 1:14
  I enjoy it, the one I don't need, John Yates.
• 1:19
  Epsom is the, Epsom's claim to fame is a suffragist, got run over by horse, yes, the King's horse,
• 1:30
  not just any horse, we don't mess about when it comes to horse, don't want to short-change
• 1:33
  Epsom. Exactly, I mean it was a significant moment in history, this is women getting
• 1:40
  the votes in the UK. Of course. I'd love to support women being able to vote, John,
• 1:45
  and I don't care who knows, that's the kind of controversial, these are the kind of
• 1:48
  issue that takes you get on uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:51
  I can't believe we've got to it so fast. I mean, where do you stand on men voting?
• 1:54
  No, definitely not. Okay, I was a little worried there, so I'm glad we've clarified
• 2:00
  that. No, just a matriarchy the whole way, which brings us nicely actually to your theories
• 2:06
  of a division and a fraction society. See that beautiful segue that I just did?
• 2:10
  It was amazing. That's what I started talking about.
• 2:12
  That's great. I thought this will help you already ahead of the game. You were thinking
• 2:15
  about females voting, King's horses, and yes, people not necessarily getting along. You've
• 2:22
  got some crazy statistics in your book about how much, how insular we are and how isolated
• 2:28
  we are, like how few people in the UK and the US know anyone who votes differently from
• 2:35
  them, like in big, consequential elections, like Brexit, and that more than half of white
• 2:42
  people don't have a black friend. Was that thing?
• 2:47
  Yeah, that's right. I thought we were diverse.
• 2:50
  Well, we are increasingly diverse. I mean, I think one of the things, one of the things
• 2:55
  I think this sort of all know, but we don't always spot is our countries are increasingly
• 2:59
  diverse, like increasingly different. Diverse is a weird word, because it sometimes is
• 3:05
  used to actually describe a group of people, right? You should do lots of community projects
• 3:09
  and people would say, oh, I'd say, what are you doing? I'm bringing people from all sorts
• 3:14
  of walks of life together to say, what diverse kids? I'm like, well, I mean kids from all
• 3:20
  sorts of walks of life. Yeah, but diverse kids, the social justice.
• 3:24
  The social justice wing of the left has made it synonymous with people from a minority background.
• 3:31
  But I think from the right as well. I think from the right as well. I think it has become
• 3:35
  sort of often just code for black and brown people. Maybe the right does it pejoratively,
• 3:41
  and the left does it crazily. Yeah, there's a lot of diverse people now in my town.
• 3:45
  What do you mean? There's a lot of diverse. Often diverse is used to describe things that are
• 3:51
  explicitly not diverse, like in the traditional sense, you know, there might be a show that's
• 3:56
  all black actors or some people in my town. It's such a diverse play. Actually, it's not
• 4:01
  diverse at all. Everyone's black. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So there's a weirdness about the way we use
• 4:05
  the word, but our countries have become increasingly in the, I think the right being in the word
• 4:10
  diverse, like we are a greater mix of ethnic backgrounds, most of the West than we used to be.
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  But we're also like a greater mix of ages, like people live longer. So we actually have more
• 4:20
  squared out an age, a greater mix of, like when my mum and dad went to university, they were the
• 4:27
  first ones in their generation to go, like it was quite rare thing. Now actually, we're much more
• 4:31
  diverse in the sense that, you know, really big chunk of people go to university and a really big
• 4:35
  chunk don't, like we are just much more difference in our countries. The thing that sort of I think
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  is kind of amazing to that I have to point it out, because most of us know it in our own lives,
• 4:48
  is we don't often mix as much as you might think across those lines of difference. So yeah,
• 4:54
  you said that there's some, there are some shocking stats, I think. So, you know, half of us
• 4:59
  don't in the UK and US, and I think probably the same in Australia, but I must admit my stats
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  there are less, less able to pull out of the air, but half of us don't have friends from a different
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  ethnic background, but the also the vast majority of pensioners in the West don't have any contact
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  with anyone under the age of 40, apart from people they're related to in the average month.
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  The voting stuff is really striking. So, I mean, the UK's biggest event sort of,
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  electorally was Brexit in the last sort of decade or so, one in four people who voted to remain,
• 5:36
  to stay in the EU, to have a single friend, the vote of the other way, one in four people who voted
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  to leave, to have a single friend that voted the other way, but probably the biggest division,
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  actually, probably in the UK, is probably about income, it's probably about wealth,
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  us Brits, Brits probably say class, but like, so you, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,
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  I sort of asked people like, imagine if you can pick this up from some great surveying and turn
• 6:00
  it into a real sort of example. So, if, if you've got
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  like people you know around, how many people would they have to invite before they accidentally
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  invited someone who was unemployed in this country, 10, 20, 30, they have to invite 100 people
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  before they'd be likely to invite someone who's unemployed. And so, it's just, we, we tend to
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  have societies that are increasingly full of difference, but we live in sort of partial bubbles.
• 6:27
  Yeah. And I can't remember whether it's your book or something else that I was reading recently,
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  which said that if you read something other than my idea, I know, it's impressive, it's
• 6:36
  impressive. This is an uncomfortable conversation. And I call me a polymath for nothing. I'm
• 6:40
  reading all kinds of things. Your book, one other book, the Bible. Okay. No, it was saying that,
• 6:47
  if you, if you tell me that someone with an MBA is getting married, then there's some,
• 6:53
  some astonishingly high likelihood that the person they're getting married to also has an MBA.
• 6:59
  Yeah. A sort of meeting is the really unpleasant term that researchers give it.
• 7:03
  Yeah. Which increasingly, yeah, sorry, we're increasingly likely to marry someone
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  of the same sort of education level as us. And people probably think, wasn't that just normal?
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  I don't think it's like wrong, but it's not actually that normal. Like, so if you go back,
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  you know, a couple of generations, and a lot of this is linked to the fact that women were,
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  my mum, as I said, actually came from quite a well off background, which is the first woman in her
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  family at good university. That's because women weren't encouraged to go to university across the
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  west. And so you'd have a situation where Dr. Male would marry a secretary or an assistant female.
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  And that's that that's changed on the heterosexual side. Obviously, I'm talking about here.
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  And now there weren't a lot of gay marriages in the past. So it's statistically that is correct.
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  This is why I'm reading coming back to it. That's that other book.
• 7:53
  Exactly. The history of gay marriages prior to the 21st century. It's called the short book.
• 7:59
  The short book. But your point about the past is an interesting one that is probably
• 8:06
  cropping up in a lot of viewers and listeners' minds, which is like, it wasn't always that kind of,
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  like, I mean, we've seen Bridgerton. There's a difference. We've seen upstairs downstairs,
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  and you know, Downton Abbey. There wasn't a lot of mixing going on.
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  Haven't people always just surrounded themselves with their cohort? If you were a coal miner,
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  you hung out with coal miners and you probably voted like a coal miner did.
• 8:26
  Yeah, I think there's a real danger of anyone who says, I think there's something slightly
• 8:31
  wrong today about something to assume that there's some imaginary past where it was all like
• 8:36
  absolutely brilliantly perfect. I mean, England recently failed to win a major soccer tournament
• 8:42
  or football tournament. Basically, it's always been that way, apart from once. That is just the way
• 8:46
  it is. So I think you should start with the basics of it's probably all whatever problem you're
• 8:50
  worried about. It's probably always been this way. And there's a bit of truth. Especially if you're
• 8:54
  talking about the Brits sucking at sport, which is it worked. A ton of the second. A ton of
• 8:59
  history. I'm asking Australia, I can say. This is something that without this truth, our nation,
• 9:05
  my nation would have very little hang its hat on. I mean, I think if I'd have to find the
• 9:09
  terms we're talking about football. And how are the sock of reels doing?
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  I'm expanding the category to sport. All sport. No, no, I'm the guest. I'm the host. I
• 9:20
  have already established that we're talking about all sports. Okay, let's talk about. Also,
• 9:24
  yes, also looks and and and suntanness. Wow. Yeah, that's also a category. So yes, so
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  we shouldn't be always like. Yeah, we shouldn't be sort of, you know, assume it was always perfect.
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  And I think most people would say also look, you know, come on, John, people always have a sort
• 9:45
  of tendency to hang out with people like them. John, they sort of, yeah, if you want to.
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  Come on, John, people always have a tendency to hang out with people like them.
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  It's funny. You should say that. A lot of people say that to me. I look, the this is so common
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  that we tend to have a phrase for this, you know, birds of a feather flock together. And it's
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  completely true. Like and it, you know, researched absolutely backs up that basic instinct.
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  There's this wonderful piece of research that like there's like 39,000 pieces of research that
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  proved the same point, but this one I really love. There's this guy in 1953 called Francis Evans
• 10:20
  who was who followed insurance salesman around going door to door in the United States. And
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  any tract who did they manage to sell insurance to you? My first ever job was door to door sales.
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  So I have a lot of sort of interest in it actually. I know one of my first jobs selling telephone
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  plans, long distance telephone plans to small businesses. Oh, I saw getting your milk delivered.
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  I feel like I had a slightly sort of friendy a gig. What was this? The 1920s when were people
• 10:45
  getting their milk delivered? You're looking very good for your age, John. Thank you very much.
• 10:52
  I really all of you like to yesterday. So yeah, he followed these sales people around.
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  And what he found was they were much more likely to make a sale if the person buying voted the
• 11:05
  same way that they did. They were much more likely to make a sale if the person buying had roughly
• 11:10
  the same level of income as they did. They were much more likely to make a sale if the person buying
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  was roughly the same height as they were. Now what Evans had basically picked up was this
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  bias, this tendency we have to sympathise to feel at home with people who somehow remind us of
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  ourselves. And we just find it again and again and again. There's this other like brilliant one.
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  There's a town in the north of England, Oldham, where they had these two schools
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  called Breeze Hill and Count Hill. And one was almost entirely white British kids and one was
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  almost entirely Asian British kids. And they decided to close the two schools and merge them together
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  to try and get the kids to mix a bit more. And the new school, a group of researchers
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  decided to work out how well is this working? Are the kids actually hanging out across this
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  line of division? And they decided to track who they sat next to at lunch because they thought,
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  well, that's where you choose. Who are you choosing? Not who you put next to? Who do you choose to
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  hang out with? And they found that the white and the Asian kids didn't mix that much. But that
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  wasn't that surprising because they've been educated to actually different schools for years and
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  years and years. So at first, it was unlikely to suddenly change. But they also tracked like other
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  things. Like they said, they tracked the hair color of the kids and they tracked whether they wear
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  glasses or not. And as someone who has ginger hair and wears glasses, I was kind of interested.
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  And what they found was that kids with ginger hair were more likely to sit next to
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  other kids with ginger hair. And kids with glasses were more likely to sit next to other kids with
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  glasses. I was just thrilled that kids with ginger hair and glasses had people sitting next to
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  at lunch. I thought that was absolutely great news. And the world has transformed. You didn't
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  remind the fact that they were being shunned by all reasonable people. I think you'll find they
• 12:48
  were choosing to hang out with each other. You tell yourself what you have to. John, that's nice.
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  So this research is getting at the same thing. Like we have this slight bias and we have done
• 13:00
  since forever towards people like us. And so I don't want to sort of go back in time and say,
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  oh, it was suddenly keen to divide. But we do have this slight bias. But some things have
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  genuinely changed. So what's changed is that societies don't be quite good coming up with little
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  places where people have to meet people who they might not choose to meet and have to spend a
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  bit of time with people who are unlike them. And so for my sort of grandparents or great grandparents,
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  that might include going along to a church or a place of worship. That might include actually
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  work at the local factory. And that's where you work. And you don't really choose who's there.
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  So you may not hang out with your Bridgerton set, but the rest of you sort of randomly thrown
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  together. You send your kid to the local school. It's just what you do. And that's how it works.
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  And there you don't choose the school. You just hang out with the people there. And you tend to
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  that age group tended to join lots of club activities like all of the clubs that like a well-known
• 14:02
  here in the UK. And I'd say I'm sure it's true, Australia and the US. They all date from roughly
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  sort of 1850 to 1900. And these clubs just connected people, moved recently to the cities,
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  kids went to the local school, quite a new institution actually, kids went to the local school,
• 14:19
  people worked in the local factory and you went to clubs and you were thrown in with people
• 14:23
  you didn't choose to hang out with. And we have that that has changed. Like those things have
• 14:28
  changed. And we've lost some of these little institutions that that knit us together.
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  So some of that's good. I don't want to be forced to work in the local factory or
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  forced to send my kid to the local school. So I'm not trying to say like it's all, you know,
• 14:39
  easy this stuff, but that is a genuine difference. Yeah. And I mean, there are real trade-offs
• 14:42
  that we can get to about, you know, when you get to the prescriptions in your book about what
• 14:48
  we might want to do. There are trade-offs between freedom of choice and the ways that we might
• 14:51
  knit ourselves back together. You call this this bias, the people like me,
• 14:56
  bias, the bias that we have towards people, you know, like me or homophily as it's technically
• 15:01
  called, I believe. And you say that, I mean, the the term that you give to the sort of ways that
• 15:09
  we knit ourselves together and form a civilization is common life as opposed to sort of self-selecting
• 15:17
  ourselves into groups of people who are like us. Do you want to just articulate, you mentioned
• 15:22
  clubs and like societies and local schools. Should we go back in time and just talk about how
• 15:29
  homo sapiens have have had common like institutions of common life going back through the ages so
• 15:35
  we can compare them to now. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really work. I think that is worth
• 15:39
  worth doing. Just to sort of ground what I mean by common life because like that's not a term
• 15:45
  that anyone will have probably heard before. I think the best illustration of it is quite a simple
• 15:52
  one which is there's this group of people who live in Tanzania, East Tanzania on the shore of a lake,
• 16:02
  like Yessie, and they're called the Hadsar. And they're like some of the most interesting people,
• 16:06
  I think, on earth. And they're interested in a couple of ways. So first of all, they're hunter
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  gatherers. So they don't farm. They hunt together. They walk around in the opposite of food and
• 16:20
  hunting and picking berries and eating. It's enormously lucky that they do hunt together. Otherwise,
• 16:26
  their name would be totally inappropriate. They've allowed to know why we're called hunt
• 16:29
  togetherers. We don't do any hunting or gathering. It's called determinism, I suspect.
• 16:35
  But they live large in many similar ways that we all lived, say 10,000 years ago.
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  Now, the Hadsar are extraordinarily interesting because they hunt together, but they're also
• 16:49
  interesting for another reason. So once a month when the moon is gone from the sky and it's
• 16:55
  completely pitch black, the Hadsar gather together at night and they perform something called the
• 17:02
  epem. Now, the epem is basically a sort of dance. And the way it works is like this. So the men
• 17:10
  in the Hadsar in the group who are camping nearby will hide. And the first man comes out from behind
• 17:16
  say some trees or something nearby. And he's wearing a black cape and he's got a rattle in his hand.
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  He's got bells around his legs and he's got blacks and a ostrich feathers. And he sort of leads
• 17:28
  the group off in the sort of rhythmic dance. And they will dance together for a period of minutes.
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  And then the next man comes out and takes the lead and they keep on going. And the children sometimes
• 17:39
  join in and the dancing lasts for sort of two or three hours. And then the Hadsar and everyone
• 17:43
  goes to minute. Now, the Hadsar have been performing this dance via epem for thousands of years.
• 17:50
  And it raises like an obvious question, which is what on earth are they doing? Like what is the point
• 17:56
  of this dance? Like it's not part of some set of religious beliefs. It's not, it doesn't result
• 18:01
  disputes. It's not some sort of political system that's required. Like so it doesn't help them to hunt
• 18:06
  altogether. Like what is the purpose of this dance? And a group of researchers got a load of research
• 18:12
  money to follow the Hadsar for a decade to work out what was, I don't know how I got the money,
• 18:17
  but to work out what was what was going on. And they track, they have to track like which Hadsar
• 18:24
  trust other Hadsar. So like who do they share tools with? Who do they bed down near to?
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  Do they gossip with? Like who do they appear to really trust? And they found there were two things
• 18:36
  that made Hadsar trust each other. The first one is probably relatively obvious in that the first
• 18:42
  was they came from the same sort of family group. So we might look at the Hadsar I think it's one
• 18:46
  group. That's not how the Hadsar look at themselves. Like they're a set of different families that
• 18:50
  form the trucks. So for them there's some diversity within their group. And the first bias you have
• 18:55
  is to people in that smaller group. If you're another people like me. But the second bias is the
• 19:00
  really cool one. So the Hadsar more likely to trust other Hadsar if they dance the Appem together.
• 19:08
  So that dance builds a level of trust across across the most family lines. There's actually
• 19:15
  stronger than the connection to their family. So what is the Appem doing? I think in our modern
• 19:21
  way of talking we'd say it's making diversity work. It is building trust across some of these
• 19:26
  lines of differences. Now I found we just don't have a term to describe like the Appem. This sort
• 19:31
  of institution that builds trust between people who might not choose to hang out. And so I said well
• 19:36
  let's call it the common life. It's part of their life. They do it regularly and they're having
• 19:40
  in common. So simple term that's called it the common life. Now what's then so interesting is
• 19:46
  when you sort of step back and you find that pretty much throughout human history you can find
• 19:51
  these little sort of common life institutions. Things that bring people together with people they
• 19:55
  don't choose to and build trust. So human history in 30 seconds is basically we were foragers,
• 20:03
  free ex. We were foragers forever. We were farmers for a few thousand years and then we were
• 20:08
  factory workers for a few sort of a hundred years. That's basically human history, foragers,
• 20:13
  farmers and factory workers. And in each of those periods of time we came up with a common life,
• 20:20
  a way of like connecting together which was actually quite different. So when we were foragers
• 20:25
  pretty much all hunt together groups have some sort of you can find in the ecological record
• 20:30
  something like the Appem. Some sort of gathering ritual institution. When you're when we are
• 20:35
  farming we stop doing all of that stuff probably because we didn't want to go out at night.
• 20:41
  Like we actually got houses, we settled down, we're in our houses, why do we want a ritual that
• 20:46
  takes us out in here? When we don't sleep under a tree anymore. Let's stop doing that one.
• 20:52
  But we created some new ones. I mean that's largely when you see organized religions starting to grow
• 20:57
  and flourish and people sort of start to go along to and this like membership of like a religious
• 21:02
  institution becomes a really big deal. And so if you notice that, there's quite a lot of religious
• 21:07
  paper. But it's really caught on. Yeah, I think it could last for a while. But it's really easy to
• 21:13
  think, I don't know how much time people would spend. So like when if you look at the average
• 21:20
  English person in the 50th century, it's really interesting study that the sort of point nails it.
• 21:24
  Like they were spending one in every five days either going to church or having some sort of
• 21:29
  feast day, some sort of celebration that would commit the village together. And they spent a
• 21:36
  huge amount of time with the rights of passage, so celebrating baptisms and funerals and weddings.
• 21:41
  These are really time consuming things. But they kind of work quite well if you've got crops
• 21:47
  because you can just leave your crops for that. You can't leave them all the time. You can leave
• 21:50
  them for a day and have a feast. When you can't really do that when you're hunting gathering,
• 21:54
  you can't need to hunt and gather today. And then as I mentioned, I sort of grandparents, great
• 21:59
  grandparents, they weren't so big on the sort of rights of passage and the feast days. In fact,
• 22:03
  a lot of factory owners banned all that stuff because they wanted people to go to work. But they found
• 22:08
  that there was new ways to connect. People living in cities for the first time, club societies
• 22:13
  spring up like mad and as I mentioned schools in the workplace. And what does that mean in club and
• 22:17
  society? I mean, I always have a vague sort of sense of clubs and societies and like
• 22:23
  my step grandfather was in the, what's the thing? One that everyone thinks is going to the free
• 22:28
  medicines that everyone thinks rules the world. But I think to someone of my generation,
• 22:35
  now the only real institutions of common life, of common secular life, would be community sports
• 22:40
  and public schools. But I don't really know what a club or an association is in the traditional
• 22:47
  factory worker sense. Yeah, so sports would definitely be a club or society. And so,
• 22:53
  and if you look at the sort of birth of the football league here in the UK, that's all around
• 22:58
  that period, 1850 to 1900, that these clubs which were men played football together after they
• 23:04
  came out of the factory on the Saturday and people went along to watch. Like that's all that
• 23:08
  period. But you also have the birth of scouts, guides, the women's institute, the mothers union.
• 23:15
  Like all of these, all of these groups are basically that period. You find the birth of sort of,
• 23:21
  we talk a little about obviously more in the last few decades, self-help, but sort of communal
• 23:25
  help groups. So groups of people would join. Imagine you moved to a city, no one in your
• 23:30
  ever in your family has ever lived in a city. Like the city, it's a, you're suddenly in the city,
• 23:35
  you know, you're used to knowing all your neighbours, everyone who lives in the village, you have
• 23:39
  no of. Suddenly, it's completely terrifying. The opportunity to join something where you can
• 23:46
  share ideas, share what's going on, work out how to get another job, work out how to sort of cope
• 23:51
  with what's happening. It's quite appealing. What I sort of think at the moment is that pubs and
• 23:57
  like bars serve that purpose to date, to some extent, don't they? I mean, you move to a new city,
• 24:02
  you would, I mean, you would make your social group by drinking. I think to some extent, I think
• 24:09
  the main difference is that you might well go into a pub, and I mean, Mike's been going to a pub,
• 24:16
  you know, I'm a Brit, I go to the pub quite a lot, Mike's going to the pub is I go with people,
• 24:19
  I know, and I hang out with people I know. And if I live in a small village, the pub might well
• 24:26
  connect with people I already knew. So therefore, I'm like, hey, hey again, hi there, hey,
• 24:30
  but in a city pubs attend to do that. Also, I mean, things have changed a lot since the creation
• 24:35
  of the phone. I do remember that when I first moved to New York, it was pre, you know, smartphone
• 24:43
  being, everyone being connected to social media on their phones, and people would just sit around
• 24:47
  in bars and strike up conversations with each other. And same on the subway, you know, people
• 24:52
  would just be sort of looking around, they wouldn't strike up conversations, but they'd be part of
• 24:55
  a common life for some kind of sense of community, because you'd all just be sitting there either
• 24:59
  reading or just looking around. And then the moment, the moment, you know, cell phone reception
• 25:04
  became available on the subway, and everyone started swiping at bars. You walk into a bar and
• 25:10
  people are either talking to people they know, or if they're alone, they're on a phone.
• 25:14
  Yeah. Yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of truth in that. I think what's what's what's
• 25:20
  powerful in what clubs and societies did is that you would join a group. You might know one person
• 25:28
  there, but you may well not know the others, and you'd be sort of forced to talk to them. You
• 25:32
  sort of forced to require to sort of get to know each other. And the key things you haven't
• 25:36
  chosen, those people, like the point that the reason why people like me syndrome, this tendency
• 25:40
  device to people like us really matters, is if you choose, if you're in the pub and you choose
• 25:45
  two people to talk to, you're going to choose the people who you think are least likely to be
• 25:49
  gingers with glasses all the way down. That's it. That's what I'm looking for,
• 25:53
  corduroy wearing, you know, overeducated, you know, think too much about politics. That's who I'm
• 26:01
  looking at. But you know, I say in jest, but it's kind of true. I'm looking for people who aren't
• 26:05
  going to go, what the hell are you talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Like that's not a bad thing. That's
• 26:10
  like a social nicety in a way, but it can be quite problematic. If you live in a town that is sort
• 26:16
  of half white British, take Britain, get half white British and half brown British and brown,
• 26:21
  the brown British residents have mostly Muslim and the white culturally Muslim at least in the
• 26:27
  white British are culturally Christian. Like that tendency can mean that those two groups just
• 26:31
  don't connect very much. Now that's when you start to have some quite sort of real serious bad
• 26:37
  stuff can start to follow, especially if you were taking advantage of it. And your argument is
• 26:41
  that the, so you're basically you're saying that the problem is not that we're different from
• 26:46
  each other, but that we are distant increasingly from each other. And that, I mean your thesis is
• 26:53
  that our divisions create space for demagogues, not the other way round, that we're not fractured
• 26:58
  because of Donald Trump or because of Fox News or because of MSNBC, but those things are
• 27:04
  able to flourish because our society, our culture is fractious. Yes. Yeah. That's right.
• 27:13
  Like the way I think about it is, if someone, we talked about my heck and a lot, so forgive
• 27:19
  me for doing it one more time, but it's like not my original intention. But then this is great,
• 27:24
  because everyone's going to want to go to the YouTube page and what and see you. So anyone who's
• 27:28
  listening to the podcast has to go and look at your amazing ginger hair, a flame like a Viking
• 27:35
  sun. Yeah, but you won't believe it. Yeah, yeah. I love it. Yeah. Just wait till you see,
• 27:45
  where did you see number six? John's hair. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Exactly.
• 27:50
  By the basic sort of the example is, if a demagogue came along, you know, say Trump got up
• 27:56
  tomorrow and said, actually, I've worked out who's at the heart of all of this. It's the people
• 28:00
  who are the absolute scumbags. And he started to, you know, pick out a minority and he went for it's
• 28:06
  it's ginger-haired people. They're the scumbags. We hate them. Like it's not going to work. Like
• 28:12
  and it's partly it's not because there's loads of us. It's not because we're secretly a cardboard
• 28:16
  or power. And we're going to shut him down though. I would love that. It's that everyone kind of knows
• 28:21
  someone with ginger hair. And it's just, you know, that we're just like very similar to all of you
• 28:26
  and it's just ridiculous, therefore. And so, but that, you know, if you went back, you know,
• 28:32
  150, 200 years where, you know, people with ginger hair in the UK may well have come over from
• 28:37
  Ireland. And as a link between Ireland and ginger hair and it's seen as sort of fanian and maybe
• 28:43
  it's to do with Irish nationalism, maybe you could whip people up a bit more and people might not
• 28:47
  know so much. Like so it's not it's not completely observed that you couldn't have a, you know,
• 28:53
  a tack on us poor gingers, but you know, we're sort. And I think you see the same thing with
• 28:59
  the change that's taken place around equal marriage. Like like a big part of that has been,
• 29:04
  well, hang on. I know you're all very worried, but I know Al and, you know, you know,
• 29:12
  Millie's really nice. And I think really, I'm kind of, I'm coming a bit hard to get angry about
• 29:18
  them. People not being able to get these are people I know. I mean, I suppose that's the moral
• 29:23
  case for coming out, isn't it? I mean, that was always the moral case for coming out to create
• 29:28
  a kind of a quorum of people who knew people who were gay. And, you know, what you say about
• 29:34
  migrants is interesting as well in the sense that many of the places where a xenophobic or
• 29:40
  Trumpist message gains the most currency are the places, are the parts of the country which
• 29:46
  are least familiar with migrants and the most cosmopolitan parts of the places where people are
• 29:50
  the most tolerant. I mean, that may not be causally related in the sense that it may be a soft
• 29:55
  selection phenomenon of course, people who move to cosmopolitan multi-ethnic environments and
• 30:00
  not bigots, you know, in the first place, but obviously it doesn't hurt to be constantly interacting
• 30:06
  with people of different races and cultures and religions in terms of opening your eyes. But then
• 30:10
  I also think about like the race riots in the UK recently where, you know, not to blame the victim,
• 30:17
  but to sort of take a big picture view of the strains that perhaps Britain's mismanagement of
• 30:24
  of multiculturalism or immigration might have put on some communities and, I don't know,
• 30:29
  the extent to which some kind of demographic or anxiety is created by proximity to migrant
• 30:35
  communities as well. It's hard to know, you know, maybe there's a sweet spot in other words,
• 30:39
  between not knowing any people of color and feeling like you're being swapped by them.
• 30:44
  Yeah, let's say the recent riots are like really good example of what I'm talking about,
• 30:49
  I think in practice, actually. So like, a lot of the violence people are talking about,
• 30:57
  look, I'm anti-migrant and there's a sense of being anti-Muslim in particular. Like, it's not
• 31:01
  uniquely anti-Muslim, but there's a strong anti-Muslim element to it. And the rumour that started was
• 31:06
  that it was all kicked off by a murder of three young girls. The rumour was that the person who
• 31:11
  had committed the murder was a Muslim, but it looks like they almost definitely worked. But that was
• 31:16
  the rumour. Now, two things are really striking about those riots, aside from just the horrificness
• 31:22
  and the genuine, the huge amount of sort of anxiety here about what's happened, but two things
• 31:27
  are really striking. So the first is like amongst the group of people in the UK, I think the riots
• 31:32
  were a good idea. There's like 7% of the population think the riots have sympathy with the riots.
• 31:37
  So it's only quite a small percentage, right? But it's still a number, 7%. Like, when you ask those
• 31:43
  people in a survey, do you think most people agree with you on that? Now remember, they don't,
• 31:47
  93% of people think it's a terrible idea. Over half of them think most people agree with them.
• 31:53
  Now, that shows an example of what I'm talking about. Like, you can just live in a little bubble.
• 31:59
  Like, you live in a little bubble where the people you interact with, and obviously turbocharged by
• 32:04
  media you might be receiving, but the people you interact with are going, yeah, I agree. Yeah,
• 32:08
  yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're not mixing with most people because most people think it's a terrible
• 32:13
  idea. And the second thing that's striking is, like, the UK is not awful at building connection
• 32:20
  across ethnic difference. It's quite a lot better than some countries, but the level of like
• 32:27
  not mixing between Bangladeshy, Pakistani Brits and white Brits, and to put it all around as
• 32:34
  well, white Brits and Pakistani Bangladesh, which is particularly high. Like, it's about the same
• 32:40
  as blacks and whites in Birmingham, Alabama. Like, it is quite a high level of non-residential
• 32:46
  connection. So, both of those things are at the heart of some of this problem. There's
• 32:51
  some people who just wanted to fight. Let's be honest. They just went along. This wanted to fight.
• 32:55
  But those two things are real problems. I mean, you'll point about the 7% is a really
• 33:01
  interesting one. And I would add to it that on the other side, there's probably also 7% of
• 33:09
  Brits who think that the only thing that happened was that white racists are going to be white
• 33:17
  violent white racists. And it doesn't make any difference what the surrounding environment is,
• 33:21
  or what immigration rates are, or what the level of integration of migrant communities is,
• 33:26
  that you're just going to have white supremacists being white supremacists. And that's all there is.
• 33:30
  Just lock them up. The funny thing is the 7% that believes that, or that claims to believe that,
• 33:35
  control a lot of the elite institutions of power, like the media. So, I don't know if it's true
• 33:40
  in the UK, but certainly here in Australia, you'll have quite a lot of echo chain
• 33:43
  verification of the way that we talk about problems like that. And the 7% really sort of assumes
• 33:49
  that everybody else is on the same page. And then there's this 80% of the country out there who are
• 33:54
  like, well, it's probably quite complicated. I mean, we probably shouldn't have entirely cash
• 33:59
  merely suburbs in an ideal world. But on the other hand, you shouldn't respond to that fact by
• 34:06
  going out and burning things. Yeah. And look, I think the difficulty is that when we talk about
• 34:13
  these things, there's two conversations happening. The first conversation is, who side are you on?
• 34:18
  I want to hear from what you're saying. Who side are you on? Are you on the side of the people
• 34:25
  who've just gone out and righted? Are you on the side of me as a sort of brown or black
• 34:30
  Brit who's actually properly scared? Who side are you on? And I'm not listening to anything you say
• 34:35
  until I'm clear which side you're on. Yes. And then the separate which is great. Of course,
• 34:39
  you're on my side. Thank God. Yeah. How did this happen? Like seriously, how did this happen?
• 34:45
  Because I don't want it to happen again. I think most people are up for those that second
• 34:48
  conversation. But they kind of need to know where you are on the first conversation. And so
• 34:52
  we turn the volume down on that need though. I mean, it would be a lot better because I mean,
• 34:57
  you're right. I find myself in this position all the time because my job is to play devil's advocate
• 35:02
  and I like occupying a gray zone. But as a consequence, whenever I start saying something,
• 35:07
  I mean, even when I was just started saying that to you, there's a part of your brain which is
• 35:12
  oh, shit, is Josh like a kind of a xenophobic? Is he pulling some far right nudge or far
• 35:18
  arch thing here where it's like the migrants fault somehow? And I can see that. I can feel it.
• 35:23
  Like I know I'm aware of it as I'm doing the talking and I'm steadfastly refusing
• 35:27
  to fall onto one side or the other. It would be good if more people, if more of us could cultivate
• 35:32
  that as an aspiration, surely. I think that's right. I think it just depend a bit on the issue.
• 35:39
  Like, you know, so, you know, my day job issue we're talking about is like a
• 35:46
  actually passionate mind. My present day job is focused on how do we prevent violent crime? How
• 35:51
  do we forget prevent life crime? Like I want to talk about some of the root causes of that crime.
• 35:55
  But I think I do need to leave by saying the reason a crime has been committed is somebody
• 35:59
  chose to commit a crime. Like, you know, the reason why someone has been stabbed is that someone
• 36:06
  chose to stab someone. Like, the agency is primarily with the person who was the perpetrator.
• 36:11
  Yes. And look, I want to get on to like the context. This person was abused as a child.
• 36:16
  They actually have no sense of personal maturing. There's a lot of stuff going on. They've been
• 36:21
  exploited. I want to get into all of that. But I need to be really straight. They did this,
• 36:27
  right? And I kind of think that's necessary for a lot of these conversations. And so like,
• 36:32
  if we're talking about, and so if we're talking about societies, and I'm really worried that we
• 36:38
  don't mix very much. So like, we sort of love our race. But I'd also talk about wealth.
• 36:43
  Like, it's quite easy to be a rich person. And look, I have a university educated. I've
• 36:49
  got a, you know, job that pays me well. So I count myself. I'm not in the top one percent of
• 36:53
  the hotel from the close and work, right? But like, I, I know how you measure it. I mean,
• 36:57
  you put, you and I probably are in the top one percent of global, of global.
• 37:01
  Yeah, definitely. Yeah. 100%. And you know, I am comparatively well off, right? So like,
• 37:08
  if we think about people who are wealthy, we tend to spend a lot of time with other people who
• 37:12
  are quite well off as well. And I think that's a really problem because when you survey wealthy
• 37:16
  people about how much poverty they're there in their country, they get it wildly wrong. They're
• 37:20
  like way underestimate the level of deprivation and poverty. And therefore, when, when government
• 37:25
  say, actually, we may need to do something about this, they're like, ah, it's all fine. People
• 37:29
  wanted to just sort themselves out. And the trouble is it's not that with scumbags is that we just
• 37:34
  don't really know people who are struggling with poverty. Now, look, if I'm talking about
• 37:38
  that issue, I don't think it's helpful to say, those scumbags, the rich, they're just scumbags.
• 37:43
  Like, I didn't have any help. I think it's better to say, look, I really appreciate that you're
• 37:46
  working hard. I appreciate you probably contributed. But I need to tell you some other stuff. So I kind
• 37:51
  of think blame doesn't. Yeah. I mean, the wealth thing is interesting. And I think it's the,
• 37:56
  I keep banging on about this that in the whole social justice revolution of the past five or
• 38:01
  10 years, there's this elephant in the room that's missing, which is our conversation about
• 38:05
  inequality and economic justice and class, actually. And, you know, the point that you make in your
• 38:12
  book is that the cohort of society that is the best at isolating itself, that is the most expert
• 38:18
  at drawing a fence around itself and dividing itself off from the rest of society isn't always
• 38:23
  has been the rich. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and we, you know, why wouldn't you? Like, there's
• 38:31
  a sort of sense of like, you know, you know, I've got, I've got my nice house. I like to go to
• 38:37
  your nice house. And that'll be lovely. And we'll all do, we'll all do that stuff. And that's
• 38:41
  all great. And we can all send our kids to these elite schools. And there'll be another
• 38:45
  and there'll be these amazing networks. Obviously, when they get the job boring to me, John,
• 38:50
  I don't know. It does. I'd rather. Yeah. Yeah. But look, my, my argument is basically like,
• 38:57
  okay, fine, but it's not great for the country that you're doing that. And it's definitely not
• 39:03
  ideal. It's not without risk for you. So what, what I mean by, what I remember that? Well,
• 39:08
  look, like a lot of people who are quite well off, if you say, how did you become so well,
• 39:13
  if there's how worked hard? Like, they massively believe in social mobility. I made this,
• 39:17
  okay, I never heard of all that money, but I would have done it anyway, right? I made this,
• 39:20
  I made this happen. They believe in social mobility. And I think that's the conversation to have,
• 39:25
  like, okay, you believe in social mobility. Great. So let's make sure everyone has the same. We're
• 39:29
  not trying to sort of take your money and just give it away. Although that too, opportunity,
• 39:33
  but we do need to do some of that. We're not going to take all your money, right? But actually,
• 39:38
  we want everyone to have an opportunity. Well, I think when you look, if you, people are genuinely
• 39:43
  serious about having a socially mobile society, everyone has a per crack of the whip, I think it's
• 39:47
  reasonable to look at the most thorough piece of research that has ever been done on what,
• 39:52
  like, causes good social mobility, which is this massive study by a guy called Rad Chetty in the US,
• 39:58
  where he got like 20,000 people's worth of tax data and their children. And they could just track,
• 40:03
  you know, what, what happened and who, it's like an amazing piece of work. And they, they,
• 40:07
  they find there are a number of things that lead to a more social mobile society. And they pick out
• 40:12
  five things as the top five to them about networks, like two of them about how much do you actually
• 40:18
  mix and connect with people from different income brackets, either through membership of clubs and
• 40:22
  societies or through just generally the residential place you live in. So if you're well off and you're
• 40:28
  like, I really believe in social mobility, well, I don't want high taxes. People just need to pull
• 40:32
  themselves up. It's like, I kind of want to say, okay, I'm going to take you at your word.
• 40:36
  So let's start doing some other things that create a social mobile society, i.e., we need to mix
• 40:41
  fin a bit more. If, if, because if all your kids, my kids have all these networks and opportunities,
• 40:47
  but other kids have none of them. And we know this, like, we, we have a phrase for this, it's not just
• 40:52
  what you know. It's who you know. That is, yeah, exactly. And everybody, yeah. And everybody has a
• 40:59
  personal experience of it. If they're over the age of 30, there's been some occasion on which they
• 41:03
  have either had to call in a favor with someone that they were lucky enough to go to school with who
• 41:07
  now happens to be a lawyer or something, or they haven't been able to because they have, they're
• 41:12
  caught in some bureaucratic miasma or like the tax offices on their back for something they got
• 41:16
  wrong. And they don't know where to turn. Well, guess what? People who went to private schools
• 41:20
  do know where to turn because there was someone in their class who's now a fancy accountant.
• 41:25
  Yeah. And those, those networks really matter. And I, you know, I said, you know, I think we,
• 41:30
  you said, it wasn't always like this. And my basic argument is we always had a bias towards people
• 41:34
  like us, but we've lost some of the institutions that sort of cause us to meet up people who are
• 41:38
  different. Like a good example of a place where they've still got some of these institutions. And
• 41:42
  probably not one you would necessarily sort of everyone would think of is, is Utah in in the US.
• 41:48
  So Utah is kind of an unusual place. And partly because the Mormon church is based there. So
• 41:55
  this sort of big sort of offshoot of Christianity. Its heartland is, is, is Utah. And sort of 40
• 42:00
  percent of people in the, in the capital city, sort of a city are members of that church. And like,
• 42:06
  what's, what's fascinating about sort of like city is in that big, what's fascinating about
• 42:11
  sort of like city is in that big study. I mentioned sort of like city comes out as one of the most
• 42:15
  socially mobile cities in the whole of the United States. And it's got the lowest investment
• 42:22
  that state has the lowest investment in schools in the US. So that's weird. Is that the church
• 42:28
  for all the schools? No, it's because 40 percent of the people go to the church and you can't
• 42:33
  choose which church you go to if you're a Mormon. You have to go to the local one. And so you're
• 42:38
  going to the local 40 percent of everyone's going to the local temple where they're meeting a
• 42:42
  mixing with for all the other people who happen to live nearby. And so if you're a poor
• 42:47
  kid in Utah, you are much more likely to build some of those networks and some of those connections.
• 42:52
  Now look, we're, we're on solutions. I'm not saying let's all become Mormon. Yeah. But, but like,
• 42:58
  we do need to just recognize, like if we're serious and sort of impartial and honest about
• 43:03
  social mobility, networks matter. And the loss of these common life places where poor
• 43:09
  kids get networks and connections actually really matters. I mean, the funny thing is that the way
• 43:14
  that we think about networks now is usually as digital networks and as ways of connecting each
• 43:20
  other digitally through common interests. And, you know, one thing that one of the great
• 43:25
  upsides of social media is the ability to form communities across space. So that if you happen
• 43:32
  to be a bit of a weirdo in your own little town in some way, you can always find like-minded
• 43:37
  people somewhere and form your network that way. But as a result, we are relying a lot more on those
• 43:43
  invisible or ineffable digital networks, which can again cause the person at the bar to be gazing
• 43:51
  at their phone and not building a real life network with the person who just walked in the door.
• 43:55
  Yeah, 100% 100% right. And like, you know, again, we mustn't become these crazy, like if only we
• 44:00
  could go back to the 1950s, everything would be sort of better. Like that, we don't have to think
• 44:03
  very hard to realize there's a lot of things that are worse than the 1950s. Like that's mad. Television.
• 44:08
  Right. I've seen Leaver to be there. It's no breaking that.
• 44:16
  I don't really want to go and work with the disease. But like we wouldn't be having this
• 44:20
  conversation if it wasn't for digital. Like, you know, there are things that ways that we connect
• 44:26
  that just wouldn't wouldn't happen. But like people like me syndrome means that we will bias if
• 44:35
  given the choice to people like us. And the easier, this is really important. The easier it is,
• 44:40
  the less friction there is in picking who you connect with, the more you end up surrounded
• 44:44
  with people like you. Yeah. So if it's digital, it's so low friction to go unfollow, follow.
• 44:50
  If it's kid, if you're hanging out with school at school, that's a little bit harder, not a lot.
• 44:55
  If it's changing, if it's changing schools, moving house. And so like the level of friction means
• 45:00
  that the level of sort of division becomes greater and less. So that's why you're who you live
• 45:05
  near tends to be slightly more mixed than who you end up at school with because picking a school is
• 45:09
  kind of you do it, whereas moving is a big deal. But we shouldn't be surprised therefore, digital
• 45:14
  really easy becomes particularly susceptible to this people like me stuff. Yes. And one of the
• 45:19
  challenges that you identify is the fact that a major culprit that has destroyed common life
• 45:25
  is the rise of choice. And so in many respects, we value a choice. And being able to choose your
• 45:31
  school instead of just having to go to the local school is great. And being able to choose, you know,
• 45:36
  having travel be cheap enough that you can choose to move countries is great. And having
• 45:42
  enough money to be able to move cities is great. And being having a wider range of occupations
• 45:48
  to choose from is great. And being able to choose who you hang out with on social media is great.
• 45:54
  And being able to choose not to do national service or join the military is great. But in all of
• 46:01
  those ways, we're selecting our group to be people like us. And we're, you know, taking small
• 46:07
  baby steps away from the fabric of a common life. Yeah. That's right. So like people like me
• 46:13
  syndrome only happens when you choose. So maximum choice is more division. The days where you
• 46:18
  advocate for Chinese style totalitarianism. That's exactly right. I think no more freedom of choice.
• 46:23
  We should just have big brother telling us the exact same thing. I think my job is just to point
• 46:28
  out there's a bit of a trade off here. Like, so like if you choose, if we have maximum choice about
• 46:34
  everywhere we send up kids to school, every note with no, with no moment that we have to sort of spend
• 46:39
  time with each other, then we can't have that and then go, I can't believe how divided everything is.
• 46:46
  Like these things are linked. And so like my analogy would be, I love sugar. I like it. I like
• 46:56
  ice cream. I like cookies. I like chocolate. I like sweets. I like these little cola cubes in
• 47:01
  particular. And I like lemon, lemon, sorbet. I just, I love all of it. It's great. If I just eat it
• 47:08
  all the time and then go, I can't believe though, I just have these headaches and I get
• 47:12
  to tired and like, I don't look very good anymore, putting on weight. This, like you're my mate,
• 47:18
  maybe. So you might not say you idiot, but internally you're thinking, dude, there's a choice here.
• 47:24
  Like I'm saying the same thing. I'm not sugar is great. But if you just have it all the time,
• 47:29
  completely all the time, there's a point of which you need to sort of say, actually,
• 47:32
  remember, we need to take some exercise. And you don't have to be like exercise is the best.
• 47:36
  Some people love exercise and they have this thing is the best thing ever. Oh my goodness. But
• 47:40
  like there is a space people to say, I don't love exercise, but it's necessary for my body to
• 47:45
  work. I don't love the idea of saying that every now and again, you've got to spend some time
• 47:49
  with people a bit unlike you. I don't love that. I like freedom. Freedom is great. But we need a
• 47:55
  bit of it. I mean, the funny thing is though, we do have a common sense intuition about sugar
• 48:00
  being bad for us. As soon as we're told that it's bad for us, it's not a great psychological leap
• 48:05
  to make the connection between the little Coca-Cola lolly and being unhappy if you
• 48:11
  only eat little Coca-Cola lollies. But there's something weird about I think the internal
• 48:16
  subjective morality of choice and division in the sense that it doesn't land for me as being
• 48:25
  a divisive thing to surround myself with good, right-minded, sensible people, which is how our
• 48:33
  clique appears to us. When you're inside an echo chamber or inside it, when you're just living
• 48:40
  your life, it doesn't land for you that there's something noble about having to put up with the
• 48:50
  ideas of people who are wrong. Yeah. So like two different things. Firstly, lots of difference
• 48:57
  isn't necessarily political, right? It's just difference, right? So like people who are a lot
• 49:04
  older than me, I mean, I disagree with them politically, I may agree with them wholeheartedly.
• 49:09
  But lots of, you know, age isn't necessarily about a difference of political opinion. But I think
• 49:14
  it's a problem if like you have a society where old people and young people don't really mix
• 49:18
  in me very much. Right, but I mean, I take your point, but that's not the keen problem that everyone
• 49:23
  is furiously tapping out column inches about when we talk about division in society. Like,
• 49:28
  we're worried about political polarization. We're worried about the populist right. We're worried
• 49:33
  about, you know, coming apart at the seams as a demos, essentially, not as a jury.
• 49:40
  Don't, don't, don't, I mean, let's go with that strand. But I think I'd say it depends
• 49:44
  of what point of time it happens to be. Like we have moments in this country where we get totally
• 49:49
  freaked out for the cost of looking after elderly people and how is the state ever going to pay for it?
• 49:53
  Well, like that is partly linked to to what extent we continue to connect and look after our own
• 49:58
  elderly. Right. Like these are not like disconnected issues. We have moments where we get totally
• 50:04
  freaked out by the level of inequality and why it's an opportunity like they used to be 40,
• 50:08
  50 years ago, but that's huge related to level of networks. We are very worried about anxiety
• 50:14
  and mental health. Now, I don't think this is the biggest part of it, but part of it is,
• 50:18
  you never mix a meter of a lot of people who live in your society are quite different.
• 50:22
  We know that makes you more anxious. So I think it depends like there are different moments
• 50:26
  where having different conversations where connections and networks really matters. But let's
• 50:31
  stick with the populist thing. Like on me, we stick with a populist thing. Like I think the truth
• 50:41
  is most of us think that other people should mix. Yes. Right. It's just we're not sure we
• 50:48
  should. Right. So like if we just take your description, look, I'm hanging out with a group of
• 50:54
  people who are right minded to all agree with me, how can it possibly be wrong? If I apply it to the
• 50:58
  other group and I say, look, here's somebody who's quite far over on the left right, pick your side
• 51:07
  and they're just hanging out with people in the same group who agree with them and feel the
• 51:09
  right thing. Do you think maybe they should have a couple of friends who disagree? You go, yeah,
• 51:14
  is anyone you apply to yourself? Of course. Well, hang on. Yeah. But most people, of course,
• 51:20
  are neither at the extreme right or the extreme right. Like most people don't think about politics
• 51:25
  very much at all. And I would say thank goodness. And they are totally sort of open to mixing
• 51:34
  and meeting people who might have different political opinions. The danger is if the people
• 51:39
  at the extremes see them as other and they end up in their own little bubble.
• 51:42
  Well, when you say that most people aren't political, it's true that they're not partisan
• 51:46
  political, you know, political actors who are focusing on the argy bargey of politics on a daily
• 51:51
  basis. But it's possible that they're nonetheless political in the broader sense that they're,
• 51:55
  that they have political intuitions that are reinforced by their community and their
• 52:00
  cultural milieu. And whilst they might be open to meeting people who differ from them
• 52:05
  along those metrics, they might not have the opportunity to do so if all of the factors that
• 52:09
  you're talking about undermining the common life, you know, are not present.
• 52:13
  Yeah. Yeah. And look, that's absolutely right. And you can see as what we saw happening
• 52:21
  around the Brexit vote was the say the salience of a political issue in someone's identity suddenly
• 52:31
  rose. So like something like wherever you think we should be past the European Union or not
• 52:37
  for a Brit, most Brits had no strong view on that matter like pre the referendum. They just
• 52:44
  like this is didn't have an opinion on that particularly. The idea it was part of your identity
• 52:48
  how you felt about this issue was like absolutely absurd. It was like do you care more about like
• 52:54
  in our world BBC or ITV as TV channels like it's just you might have a slight reference like
• 52:59
  that's not your identity bonkers. It becoming a referendum suddenly it became like an identity
• 53:05
  to remain was to be sort of a bane and to be open and to be educated and to be and to leave
• 53:10
  was to be a serious person who cared about the community and part of the country and believed in
• 53:14
  Britain. Like these identities created in the thus the division grew. And I think you've seen
• 53:21
  the US like this sense of identity about being a Trump or not Trump has massively grown. You just
• 53:28
  become way more vulnerable to that the more the more you the less you're likely to be thrown into
• 53:32
  contact. Yeah and one of the useful distinctions that you make in the book is that as you say that
• 53:36
  the kinds of things that foster common life have going to have one of two characteristics they can
• 53:42
  either be intense experiences or they can be routine experiences. So like the sporting association
• 53:48
  or you know school or whatever that's just a routine experience that stitches you together with
• 53:53
  other people from different walks of life. But what you're talking about there like a referendum
• 53:58
  or a war or a military service or something like that is an intense experience that forces people
• 54:03
  together. Yeah that's right and I think it's really important because what builds that connection
• 54:09
  across lines of difference isn't just being in the in the same space. So it's not just going to
• 54:15
  being in the same park. It's actually being in that same park when it's bombed. That's what you
• 54:22
  want to really forge a sense of solidarity or playing rounders or softball also doing something
• 54:31
  together. Like the most like the most extreme to play to your bombed point like the most extreme
• 54:37
  example of like what common life turned up to 11 can look like. It probably comes from an
• 54:44
  experience that men had during the Second World War and so like the the most extreme example is
• 54:49
  I sometimes call this how Hitler desecrigated the US army which is obviously a slightly
• 54:54
  unusual way to frame what happened but it's probably kind of fair. Like so at the very end of
• 55:00
  the Second World War pretty in Europe but near the end the Nazis are basically to use a technical
• 55:06
  term screwed. Like they're in serious trouble and they're surrounded coming from East and West
• 55:12
  and Hitler does what he always does in these circumstances. He basically sort of massively rolls
• 55:16
  the dice and does something crazy and he instructs his generals to attack that this massive line
• 55:23
  of US and UK have burst down France and they're taking France fast and he instructs the generals
• 55:31
  to attack the supply line which is sort of a mad thing to do. He's not really gone off men to pull
• 55:36
  them in but he does it and on the 16th of December 1944 early in the morning about 400,000
• 55:45
  Nazis soldiers attack the the US UK Allies supply line and it's called the Battle of the Bulge
• 55:51
  and it's just huge surprise attack and the Allies are caught unawares and and the the the generally
• 55:56
  charge in Europe who's Eisenhower is like what are we going to do and he says we need to call men
• 56:01
  to the front we need more men to the front and he instructs his his direct command to get more men
• 56:05
  to the front. He said there are no more men to deploy he insists insist there must be men to
• 56:09
  deploy and eventually he's told okay there are some men we haven't deployed and I was not as
• 56:13
  furious and it's like deploy them now and he's told we can't deploy them because it's illegal
• 56:19
  and I was like what are you talking about and the answer is that they are black they're African-American
• 56:25
  servicemen who have been trained to fight at the front line but they're not allowed to fight
• 56:29
  alongside white servicemen because the US army segregated like the US southern states are segregated
• 56:35
  and Eisen has like I don't care right we need the men any of those black men who are up for serving
• 56:42
  we will deploy them. So black men about 2000 volunteer and they deployed alongside white
• 56:47
  servicemen for the first time in the US army in the Second World War and the battle is one
• 56:54
  and the fight is won in the war of CX. Now about two years later Truman president then
• 57:01
  president says okay I think it's time to move towards desegregating the whole army and they survey
• 57:06
  the US army the white servicemen about whether they support the desegregation and they don't
• 57:11
  like 70% of them don't they think it should stay segregated apart from there's one battalion
• 57:17
  there's one battalion that has a different view and that battalion is the white servicemen who are
• 57:22
  fought on the front line alongside those black men and in that battalion 93% of those white men are
• 57:28
  massively in favor of desegregating immediately. Now what had changed those men's mind it wasn't like
• 57:34
  a lecture it wasn't like a being taught to it was a very very intense common life experience
• 57:41
  and those men had fought alongside each other and as you say like there's two key things to that one
• 57:46
  is intensity like that intense shared experience has created an identity that was stronger than
• 57:53
  that identity had been black and white and it made them feel connected and the second was
• 57:57
  routine that the evidence is like actually that loading and unloading a rifle or marching alongside
• 58:03
  each other creates a sense of us that's why armies march like marching as a kind of slow way to get
• 58:07
  anywhere actually the reason the reason you do it is it creates a sense of us which is a weird
• 58:12
  psychological thing so like we need to do things together that are either intense or have some sort
• 58:17
  of routine that's why religion often has routine ritual in it creates a sense of us and it's not
• 58:22
  about saying don't have your identities not about saying don't support Trump or do support Trump
• 58:27
  like you could have your argument about that separately it's about saying we're going to create a
• 58:30
  different identity that actually is there as well and so you're the Muslim you're the Christian
• 58:36
  no one's trying to mess with that but we're trying to do something together at some
• 58:39
  pointing you're like to create another identity that's us together so all we need to do is we just
• 58:45
  need to get Germany to start another world war and then we'll be able to invade Europe again and
• 58:52
  finally the number of times I've done a few people just don't get it well so is it inevitable
• 58:58
  because so there are things like the blitz and you know keep calm and carry on and
• 59:03
  you know 9-11 would be another example of of finding instant national unity there are transformative
• 59:11
  figures like I mean the way you were just talking about you know you might be a Trump supporter or
• 59:16
  you might be a Muslim American or you might be whoever you know but you can still come behind
• 59:21
  some greater cause sounds very much like the Barack Obama Democratic National Convention speech
• 59:27
  in 2004 that put him on the national stage where he's saying there is no black America there is no
• 59:32
  white America you know there is no red America there is no blue America there's just the United
• 59:37
  States of America and yeah people are suckers for that yet it doesn't strike me that that's very
• 59:43
  easy to like stitch into daily life like the pandemic was a good example where I remember in 2020
• 59:51
  we were like wow what's the world going to look like on the other side of this thing maybe this
• 59:55
  is a real opportunity for greater connectedness and you know when we can hug each other once again
• 1:00:01
  it's going to be a transformed world I mean yeah not really I don't yeah and I don't really I don't
• 1:00:08
  really put that much hope in these sort of grand national moments and I think that they're part they
• 1:00:14
  pass so like I'm not like to hear the rest of this conversation go to uncomfortable conversations
• 1:00:19
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