The Conversation That Changed Everything: Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein & Dave Rubin

22:40Eric Weinstein:Precisely the people with enough success. But that shouldn't mean they would be willing to turn it. That's the thing. That's where I don't get the distinction. The number of people with nine and ten figures worth of wealth who talk to me about the rich and the powerful as if they are some different group is very high. Rich is richer than me. That's what I figured out. I think there's a difference between people who have their senators on speed dial and people who don't. So, you know, the rich is not a monolith, and that's one of the huge problems in this story. If you're engaged in some kind of business like armament or extraction, where you need to have a very close relationship with government, you see the world very differently than if you're very good at picking investment opportunities and you just want to be unfettered in your ability to go make more.

23:34Eric Weinstein:I think that one of the things that really resonates about your message, and I feel a little bit less close to Ben on, is that somehow the message that you should improve your own life got conflated with, if your own life isn't awesome, it's because you failed to make it so. And I think that was sort of more true in a period of uniform high growth as between 1945 and 1970 When you know if you had beta to the system if you just had exposure Hard work usually paid off. I think that depending upon what sector you're in what your skill set is where you are in your life It's very hard for some people to turn things around And the idea of look you may not be able to solve your problem You solve the problems you confront, but you can solve the portion of the problems that you can solve yourself and that you should at least do that, that is a very different message because it says even if I'm not living in luxury at the end of it, it's not because I failed.

24:31Eric Weinstein:And I think that decoupling... That's a fair distinction. And I would probably, given that criticism, I'd probably agree to the curbing of my own kind of solution. I think that's right. Clearly there are people... We are all created equal in our rights. We're not all created equal in our abilities or in our capacity to rise or fall in a society. Or in our sectors. Right, 100%. And I would do the other half of that thing, which is I would climb down from asking, you know, if more people were willing to admit that, I would say, OK, it's very important that people at least make a copayment of trying to solve the problems in their own life before demanding that the outside world.

25:06And that's the part that I focus on more simply because I think that the government is so big. I mean, this is where politics and philosophy meet, right? So I think the government is so big and so intrusive and so involved in so many areas of our life that the tendency right now in America is to blame other people for the problems that you have. And that's true on virtually every side of the aisle. I think that when you and I have disagreements about trade theory, but I think when President Trump goes to a Rust Belt town in Ohio and he says, I'm going to bring back all your jobs because the Mexicans and the Chinese screwed you.

25:36I think that that's a lie. I don't think he's bringing back those jobs.

25:39Eric Weinstein:You and I aren't disagreeing about that. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that when my solution to that is there's not necessarily a solution. I think one of the lies is that there's always a solution to every problem that can be had if you just have enough communal power behind it. And I don't think that's right. I think that the solution for most problems in life, not all, because I don't think all problems in life ever get solved, but at least the majority of the major mistakes people make in their life that create obstacles that they can never overcome the rest of their life are self-inflicted.

26:04I think that the barring serious health problems or mental disability, I think that the number of problems that make it impossible for you to overcome sheer dire poverty in the United States, virtually all of those problems are problems that people put in front of themselves. And so if you can make those basic decisions, then you can turn your life around in a pretty significant way. Or even if they're not problems that people create for themselves, they're problems that they're subject to that are also very intractable to communal level solutions. Like mental illness is a good example of that and its contribution to homelessness.

26:37It's like, well, it's terrible to be mentally ill and to end up on the streets. It definitely is terrible. But it isn't like we actually know how to solve that. So even if that can't be put at the feet of the individuals who are suffering, it's like, okay, well, we'd like to sort that out communally. It's hard to sort that out without making it worse. We don't know. Do you guys think we can only make it a little better or a little worse? Like, of course, all hell could break loose on one side of it, but that within the margins, like it's pretty good and we can maybe make it a little better, but that the capacity for humans to make a system much better than this that will allow the most people to flourish.

27:13We can make it not much worse. Like that's what I'm hoping is that we can aim for incremental improvement, which compounds, by the way. So that's very powerful incremental improvement. But we could aim for incremental improvement while deciding that we're going to stay off, stave off chaotic and unnecessary descents into the abyss. Right. Which is what I see the danger in this polarization process is generating. It's like a catastrophe that we actually don't need. What do you make of the amount of people that seem to want that right now? I mean, I always say every week on the show, it's like Twitter is not real life.

27:44Yeah. But the amount of people that I'm seeing constantly talking about tear it down, and now the new attack on civility, where even if you say be civil, be respectful, that that is now thought of as a tool of the patriarchy or a tool of the oppressed or all of that stuff. What do you make of that assault? I mean, I think, first of all, the fundamental hatred of the system by a lot of people is, I'm not going to justify it, given the fact that the system that we have is the best that has ever, you know, happened to any human beings in the history of the world. I mean, this is a pretty great place to live.

28:15Compared to all other places. Right, right. I'm not saying compared to utopia, compared to heaven. I'm not saying can't get any better. I think that one of the great dangers always is utopianism. And I think you're seeing it from both sides. I mean, right now, when you saw Alexandra Ocasio-Sanchez win in New York, and she's promising universal healthcare, universal college tuition, universal housing, right? All of this stuff is gonna magically happen. And she's asked on MSNBC how you're gonna pay for any of this, and she just basically says, well, just how FDR did. FDR didn't, okay? That was one of the big problems.

28:43And also, there was a giant world war happening at the time. So it's the itch to come to a solution. And something has to grow to provide that. That's the thing. It's like, you really wanna make a state that has enough power to grant all those wishes. It's like careful what kind of genie you generate because it's going to have a demand on you. I don't think the free markets are inherently utopia, and I don't think that a vast government is inherently utopia, but I think free markets at least have a certain respect for human labor, dignity, and individuality, and collectivist utopias certainly do not.

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30:27Visit relieffactor.com or call 1-800-4-RELIEF. So what do you say to all the people that are going to listen to this that I think you're a little more sympathetic to than the rest of us that are going, but we need help, or this sounds cold, or too individual?

30:42Eric Weinstein:What I have to say is going to be colder than this. You guys are, like, warming my heart with your stories about individuals pulling themselves up with their bootstraps. I mean, there was a phase change in the economy around 1970 that I cannot get people to focus on. And, you know, if you look at, like, GDP, which is a very flawed measure, and median male income, which Tyler Cohen, I think, was the one who pointed out that this is the best version of the argument. One of these things, they're both going up together until, like, 1970. And then one of them flatlines the other that keeps going. And the idea that this is not a structural change that is in every school textbook and that we don't understand that we've built up two-plus generations of experts lying about what happened.

31:29What do you think happened? Why did that? Because I've read criticisms of the decoupling theory.

31:34Eric Weinstein:Nobody likes my version of it, but I'll give it to you. I'd like to know because I don't understand it. Everyone who cares about this stuff should read a guy named Derek DeSola Price, who was active in the late 50s and started talking about there will be a singularity in science. So he looked at Price's law. Yeah, number of PhDs, number of journals, number of amount of funding. Everything was going up exponentially, and things that go up exponentially cannot continue. And so he predicted this is going to end because there will be too many PhDs per child. And sure enough, that system sort of came apart.

32:12Eric Weinstein:So if you look at the period from between 1945 to 1970, you have this growth regime, and everything that got built during that time has what I call an ego, an embedded growth obligation. If it doesn't grow at this rate, it's going to turn pathological. And so we built a ton of infrastructure around this beautiful period of high, broadly distributed, fairly even and stable technologically-led growth. and that ended and then began this crazy period of excuse making where we found every gimmick known to man and if you want to read an article about this call i think i wrote one called anthropic capitalism in the new gimmick economy and so part of the problem is is that the concept of jobs as how we feed ourselves rather than creative enterprises or something else jobs are probably tied to a period of time that isn't going to go on forever and it's probably weakening as a means of feeding us so the market was unbelievably brilliant and then there was a structural change and now the question is how do we account for these egos that make embedded growth obligations that make liars of all of the experts who service the institutions so the big problem that we're having the reason we can't wake up from this madness is is that you've had since about 1970, people having to lie to keep the institutions afloat.

33:33What's the lie?

33:34Eric Weinstein:Well, take a law firm. The idea is you have some number of partners. The partners have associates. All the associates want to become partners. So you have to tell them a story about if you work hard, you will become partners. But when you hit steady state, like the professors, the professor wants to have 20 students, the 20 students want to become professors to have 20 students. None of this stuff works anymore. But the income ability levels are... It's a hidden... What do you call that game? It's a hidden pyramid scheme of concepts. It's a hair-in-hidden pyramid scheme. But the income-ability levels since 1980 have been relatively stable in the United States.

34:04Eric Weinstein:Well, we've been a very rich family trying to figure out ways to live out our days in the style to which we've become accustomed. And we found every kind of gimmick known to man, whether it's offshoring or mergers and acquisitions or self-regulation of markets. All of these things that we learned how to do. Is the big problem just the transfer over to the service economy and the intellectual economy as opposed to manufacturing? Well, the thing is is that a lot of this was led by something like, you know, science in the form of let's say just semiconductors coming out of physics. You know, how much of our current growth has been scientifically led?

34:40Eric Weinstein:And now, you know, with Moore's law, the reason everybody talks about it is it's one of these growth laws that can't go on forever. So it's been doing pretty well. I mean, part of it, I know things that are impossible can't continue forever. That's the rule. And the doubling seems to be one of those things. The idea is that we've been pretty good staving off disaster for a very long time. It seems to me, though, that there is, and this is perhaps part of the contradiction that people are wrestling with, is like, and you're pointing to structural deception, let's say, something like that, and the delusions that go along with it.

35:12But it also does seem to me, and this is where the measurement issues become so complicated, is that even though wages among men have been flat since the 1970s, I think you could make a pretty cogent case that we are actually in many ways much richer than we were. First of all, the world's much richer. There's much less poverty worldwide, and in an absolute sense as well. And so even if the average American isn't richer, let's say, although we could dispute that, the world that surrounds him is much richer, and that actually constitutes a form of accrued wealth. Because you're actually safer when a quarter of the Chinese aren't starving and a quarter of the Indians aren't starving.

35:48I appreciate this. Okay, so, but then I would also say, so, although there's been local stagnation in the West, arguably, there's been massive global improvements. But then the other question is, is the idea of local stagnation actually accurate? Because there are lots of ways that we are clearly way richer than we were. Now, we're certainly richer in terms of our access to high-quality information at a very, very low cost. And so the technological revolution seems to be real. And we can purchase a lot more of this high-quality technology for less money than we could. So I'm not entirely convinced about the wage stagnation argument.

36:31Eric Weinstein:There's a tremendous amount to be done about the metrics about how we measure these things. There's also a total flaw that is suffused throughout economics. I just came back from four days in Venice. And the first day in Venice, I thought, this place is unreal. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial.

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37:16Eric Weinstein:See terms. Every 52 years didn't prepare me. Right, right, right. Four days later, I was like, wow, there's so many tourists. And, okay, you can go over this place again. It took almost no time to remove that level of magic because I got used to it that quickly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, that's a problem. We get used to things that are going well extraordinarily quickly. Hedonic numbing is a real issue. The other thing is that what were the Gini coefficients measuring the inequality during the period that was going up? We're now in a period of such inequality that humans are very focused on things like status.

37:54Eric Weinstein:And so it's not clear to me that people wouldn't be actually happier in a totally different regime. I mean, we have enough plastic stuff from China. Exactly right. Now, in all of that, my claim. Okay, so that's an interesting issue, because one of the things we could say, perhaps, is that between 1945 and 1972, what was provided for people wasn't so much a standard of living that's higher than we have now, but a trajectory of development that appeared more stable and believable. And low variance. Yes, and then the question is, well, what actually do you want? Do you want a high standard of living, or do you want to believe that if you put in incremental mental effort, your life can improve.

38:37And it could easily be that people will rather have that.

38:40Eric Weinstein:What if I want the ability to make a 30-year plan? We want the ability. Yes. If what I value is the ability to make a 30-year plan, and I want to have some idea of how I'm going to get to my retirement and put kids through school and do all of this. And that it's this plan. Yeah. The predictability is gone, no question. There's too much volatility. That's why I said jobs are not going to be the means of redistribution of the wealth. Right. I do wonder if, on the individual level, I think that that's, you're right, there's an enormous amount of chaos and volatility in the system. But I think that the only thing that you can say to that is the same thing that that's been true for most of human history.

39:16The time when people could actually stably predict that in 30 years I will be significantly better off than I am now and I can make a retirement plan, that's about 50 years of human history. Before that, it was basically, you have two kids, one of them dies, and then your wife dies and child birth with the second. You have one of two. You have eight, right? And you have eight, and six of them die. Three are miscarriages and fine. And so this dream that we had from 1940 to 1970, even if I accept the premises, I'm not sure that that's a realistic dream about what human beings do. That was my point.

39:49That was the anthropic capitalism.

39:50Eric Weinstein:You just described it. Okay, good to not underperform your article. There's a little bit more in there. No, I'm sure there is. I'm just joking. But the only point I'm making is that I think that what really has been lost, and this is the part that I'm really focusing on a lot lately, is we can't control the situation around us, but we can control our reactions to the situation. And what I mean by that is these massive systemic changes that we're talking about, we, number one, don't agree on what those systemic changes should be. Right. Or even what they are. Right, what they are or what they would do.

40:20Nobody knows what the hell they would do. And with all of that said, the one thing that you can control is the amount of virtue that you yourself pour into your life. And it seems to me in a non-virtuous position that because somebody else is earning more than you, you are therefore worse off. And so what we really have lost, I think, and this may be an outgrowth. I mean, there's an argument to be made. I know General Goldberg makes this argument, for example, that sort of late-stage capitalism or advanced capitalism tends to lead to this rat race where we are looking at what the guy next door to us has.

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42:06So let's imagine that a rising tide does lift all boats and that's actually happening. but we're purchasing that at the price of a certain degree of predictability and stability into the future. That seems quite clear. And that's exaggerated by this incredibly rapid rate of technological change. It's like, okay, so how do we tolerate all that uncertainty, given that we're also deriving substantial benefit from it? We don't want to mess it up. And what I've been suggesting to my audiences is get your act together as much as you possibly can, because the way that you deal with uncertainty is by being prepared for anything and everything that's going to come your way.

42:40And so you want to put yourself together so that when the difficult decisions come along, even though we can't predict what they are, you're going to be in the best possible solution. There's a new message here.

42:49Eric Weinstein:The new message is that whatever, like, I want to tell somebody, you know, very often I hear parents, like, we have two children and one of them is living at home. And I say, okay, let me explain in part why your child may be living at home when you're disappointed that that's happening. Right? And so I go through the economics argument. The person feels better. Oh, wow. Or I explain, you know, here's why you're not able to catch up to your parents. It's not all about your personal failure, right? And so the idea is that that personal responsibility is something that we need and we also can't have, right?

43:20Eric Weinstein:It's too dangerous. You have to do this tailored message. And I think you've been intuiting this. Like, here's the portion of your life that you're responsible for. We're going to delineate it. And if your room isn't cleaned up, it's not because of the government, right? That was your point. Saying, and this is, you know, again, you and I are going to have to do this at some point. This is a great country, and well, if you put your mind to making money, then it may be the case that stick-to-itiveness and passing the marshmallow test and being inventive and creative works. But there are a lot of people who are given a very different message, and they grow up being told, you know, be a good person and work hard.

43:57Eric Weinstein:And a lot of this stuff doesn't work the way it used to. It just doesn't. And lying about it offends me. So I want to say, look, if making money is very important, and we need to be able to talk about the role of money. Money is fungible. Everything else is not. So if you make money, then you have lots and lots of options. And we need to give people the idea that that's a good thing to pursue if they have any hope and dream. But it's also the case that fundamentally what your message is is you have to make the copay. And the copay is the part of your life that you absolutely control. And if that's out of control, don't expect anyone else to take any sympathy.

44:35Well, then you can also make, if that part of your life is in order, you can also make a more credible argument for the existence of unreasonable systemic impediments because you can say to yourself, look, I put everything into this, and then you can make a credible case.

44:49Eric Weinstein:This is why this is the attractive version of the personal responsibility thing. We have another problem here with our discussion about dispossession because one of the things that's bothered me about the left and the right is the right tends to think, well, if you just got your act together and worked hard, you can make it. And the left tends to think, well, everybody's the same, and if you removed systemic impediments, then everybody could do whatever they needed to do. Well, the left is wrong because there's a real diversity of ability. But the right is wrong because there's a real diversity of ability.

45:22And so, for example, there is a distribution of IQ, which is real. And if you're, the psychometric data basically indicate that if you have an IQ of less than 90, which is about 15-20 % of the population, you actually can't read well enough to follow instructions. And you might say, well, that can be rectified, say, through educational means and so forth, and the evidence for that is pretty damn thin. And so the problem with a society that's meritocratic, fundamentally, even if it's meritocratic based on character, is that there's still going to be individual differences that seem to be innate, that are going to produce radically unequal outcomes, many of which are painful.

46:00Eric Weinstein:Yes, but the thing that you will have a hard time convincing me of, having gone through the PhD system in the sciences, is that some of the world's most brilliant people hold PhDs in the sciences. And I came up at a time when in the early 90s, these people were told that the world was their oyster and that we were desperately in need of scientists. And I remember a friend of mine being told that he had a$14 ,000 a year job offer post-PhD from MIT with a pregnant wife. And the person who offered it was like, this is great. We can get people for pennies. Right. And why was that? It was because of something that came out of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation to slam American workers in the sector.

46:47Eric Weinstein:This is very, very important. It had predicted that people would be paid six figures for PhDs, which was larger than they had been paid for a long time. And it was the meddling with the market. The thing that I don't like about the personal responsibility issue is that individuals should not be solving the problems of, let's say, tech groups getting together and say, we will not poach each other's employees. The market has to work for people, not just institutions. And if you're in a sector in which you can make the market work for you, you have this feeling of anybody can do this. And in fact, what you need to do is you need to migrate to these sectors because there are other sectors where you have, let's say, government intervention, which says we are going to interfere with the free working of the market or we are not going to take into account that some people produce public goods.

47:38Eric Weinstein:And so it's very important to me to understand that some people are coming out of very different circumstances, in which it's very unlikely that they will be able to make their world grow and blossom, and that other people of extraordinary ability and high IQ and work ethic find themselves not fighting forces that they don't even understand. Well, this is the sort of criticism that's often levied at me, because people say, well, you don't take the systemic problems sufficiently into account. And so that's a nice outline of the systemic problems. When the banks decided that they should be self-regulating with respect to their gearing ratios or the risk, there was one guy who wrote in to this SEC hearing to allow these investment banks to do the last little bit before 2008 blew up everything.

48:26Eric Weinstein:This guy Len Bolle, who was a computer consultant to banks. It's like one guy in the entire country saw a disaster coming and got involved. That refresh you've been putting off until the right deal came along? It's here! Wayfair's Black Friday in July sale is happening now, so you can finally get the style you've been waiting for for less. Get up to 80 % off area rugs and up to 60 % off outdoor and bedroom furniture. Shop Wayfair's huge selection of styles and find the piece to fit your style, budget, and space. Plus, free shipping! Black Friday in July ends July 27th. Shop today at Wayfair.com.

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49:06Eric Weinstein:In this internal game that was by banks for banks And so what's very important to me is to understand When you have bad behavior by institutions It is pathological to put that responsibility on individual shoulders Well, the only coda I would make to that And I think that's a fair comment Is that what I'm hoping And what I'm trying to convince people of Is that their ethical responsibility which is partly to further their own development to the degree that they can, does extend to the community, is that you want to make ethical citizens so that they don't make mistakes that corrupt the operation of the system at a systemic level.

49:44The best way to do that, in my estimation, over the long run, is to concentrate on the ethical behavior of the sovereign citizen. Now, that doesn't address the systemic problems that are already in place. The systems affect more people. That means that when people make vague accusations about systems that are dysfunctional, then it's not helpful. What I see is not, you're making very specific criticisms of very specific institutions in very specific ways. And that's useful, because then we can actually have a discussion about where those systems go wrong. So you can have a discussion about - You're not criticizing the patriarchy.

50:14Right, exactly. We can discuss -

50:15Eric Weinstein:No, I'm trying to crowd that out. And part of the point is that almost nobody in the regular commentariat wants to talk to me about what went wrong with our immigration policy, How do we get into trouble with mortgage-backed securities? What's going on with CPI adjustment? Because I've... Well, the problem is to have that conversation. Well, fortunately we got something better going on here, so let's not worry about that. But you know, we only have about 10 minutes left because you got a hard out. So I thought we'd do a little self-therapy while we're here. So I want to ask you each one thing.

50:44I'll even answer it myself. And then we can all sort of comment. I'll start there. If you had one blind spot, what do you think it might be? I've asked you guys some version of all of this before, but a lot changes over the time that we keep doing this. But if there was something that you thought was your personal blind spot, what would it be? Well, I would say, I don't know if I can identify a specific blind spot, but I could say in general, I know perfectly well that I don't know enough about a lot of the things that I need to know about to make the sorts of arguments that I'm making. Like I'm painfully aware and increasingly aware, I would say, of just how much I don't know, how much more I need to be reading and concentrating on to flesh out what I have to say.

51:29Like, I don't know. I don't know enough about economics. Barely anything. I don't know a lot about history. Barely anything. And so I'm more and more aware of how much I don't know. And now I don't know if that's the kind of blind spot that you were thinking of, but it's terrifying to comprehend that and still try to move forward in this sort of space. It makes it tough to be a public person these days, right? Because everyone wants you to know everything about everything all the time. Well, you end up with the problem that Eric was just describing, which is, you know, the reason that people won't contend with you is because you force them to move from their low-resolution ideological certainties into domains where specific knowledge is necessary.

52:10You instantly expose everyone's ignorance. It's like that's hard on the people that you're having the discussion with, but the devil is in the details.

52:19Eric Weinstein:Up until the last sentence, I would say that I would love you to shorten that and put it on a bumper sticker for me. It was a brilliant summer. Blind spot, Shapiro? I mean, I find it hard to argue with any of that. I think that if you're intellectually curious, then that means that you know that you don't know anything. So I agree with everything you just said. I mean, as far as other intellectual blind spots, I mean, or other blind spots generally, I would say that for me, the constant struggle is I find myself more stressed out now than I was two years ago when no one gave a crap what I thought.

52:52Right. I mean, so. So the fact is that it's, you know, living a less stressful life in the middle of believing that people actually care what you think. It means you have to take your stuff much more seriously. That's not really a blind spot as much as a concern. And I think that that means that, you know, just the commitment to hearing more about things is deeply necessary. But it also means that it just means that your life in many ways is more miserable than more people know about you. And it's not a poor me thing. I love what I do. I love the fact that people care what I think. Like, that's what I live for is that people care what I think.

53:26Is it really? I mean, it's pretty sweet. You've got a lot of good stuff going on. Oh, no, I've got a ton of great stuff going on. But the fact is that I spend— The risk is higher. The risk is higher. And in some ways that makes you a better person. And it's almost like the old kind of religious slogan that if you feel God is watching you all the time, then you're more likely to be a better person. And there is that feeling like, okay, if I make a mistake, I want to be the first person to notice that I made the mistake and correct that mistake. But that also means that you live with a lot more self-doubt and a lot more second-guessing of yourself than you did when nobody cared.

53:54So that's not as much of a blind spot as a concern. The problem with trying to identify your own blind spots is that they're in your blind spot. That's why I asked the question. I wanted to make you think a little bit. It's funny because just the other day, or it was yesterday actually, I did the Adam Carolla podcast, which he's, you know, it's comedy and he's doing more of a radio show thing. So you speak a little more freely. And I was about to say something very politically incorrect. And I obviously don't have a problem doing that generally, especially when I'm doing comedy. And just for a moment, I had you sort of ring in my head about be careful about your words.

54:23And I was like, I just don't feel like offering up one extra comment. Life is less fun that way, right? Because it's like the stuff that you felt like you could say a year ago. Now you realize not only maybe you shouldn't have said it a year ago, but also you feel like if I, if, am I, you're constantly saying, am I curbing myself because I'm afraid or am I curbing myself because it's the right thing to do to curb myself here? And that's, that's an interesting sort of calculus you have to do all the time. Yeah. I think if you're concerned that it's because of fear, then you might want to take the risk of saying it, you know, cause I've, I've, I've tried to wrestle with that problem is like, you know, or maybe am I avoiding this because I think it's bad or because I don't want to take on the responsibility.

55:02If you have suspicions about that, then you should do it. Because I think you should arm yourself against your weaknesses and take that risk. I think it's better developmentally to do that. All right, I'll answer it for myself, which is a cue off something your brother said to me once, which is that perhaps I have a little PTSD from the left. So my focus on and these completely bananas ideas has been so singularly stuck in my mind that maybe it lets some other things slide every now and again. I'm trying to be very aware of that and trying to figure out how to go forward on that. So does that mean you're a little bit more on the attack than you'd like to be because?

55:40I think I want to ease up on a little bit of the attack on that. I think I've spent the last couple years really, it was first me identifying it for myself. Really, I was interviewing all of these people and figuring out that they were often going through the same thing I was, but then it morphed into going on the attack about it. And now I feel like because, and again, I say the word winning with, you know, a little tongue in cheek, but because I do sense something has turned here, that maybe I can get my foot off the gas a little bit on that and focus on the big ideas that I really care about.

56:12I thought about that in relationship to this whole group. It might be nice, but I think we should really be careful to use minimum necessary force. And there's idiocy on the left and on the extreme right that needs to be pointed out. But it might be better if we did the minimum necessary amount of that, because it also starts to become something you can parody quite easily at some point, and more and more of delineating what the alternative might be if there was a positive alternative. It will be interesting to see what happens with the IDW as it moves beyond the critique. Because what's really unified us, I think, has been a lot, the critique.

56:50The critique of intersectionality and the identity of politics. And once we move into the space where we're actually trying to maybe build something together or come to some sort of ideological consonants, then some of these, some of these, I hope the, what I hope is that if we're going to recapitulate the arguments, I hope that we recapitulate the arguments in a more reasonable, cogent, and intelligent way, you know, in terms of the actual political arguments. But I'm not sure that those, I think that none of us, I hope, are dreaming that there will actually be an ideological consonants among the lot of us.

57:17No. Because clearly that is something that is not going to happen. I mean, we all have significant disagreements among ourselves on all of these issues. But how beautiful that is that we're all kind of working through it in our own way, and we're all not going to get to the exact same ending, but we'll kind of go with each other the whole time. Blindspot, Weinstein.

57:34Eric Weinstein:Oh, my gosh. It's more or less infinite. I think that I do a terrible job of when somebody is making a bad analytic argument but has intuited their way to the right conclusion, I tend to discount them as if the analytic argument was how they should be thinking so different kinds of minds Who have their variables, you know if you if you think nothing of Myers-Briggs it should at least