Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (15:26)
You're welcome. Don't miss the all new Ben After Dark tonight, 7:30pm Eastern only on Daily Wire. Plus, Kanye west rejects antisemitism. I covered on the show a week or two ago this song, Heil Hitler, taking the Internet by storm before it was taken down from all the platforms other than X. I think one of the only places on YouTube you can still hear even part of the song is on. My reaction to it, and I had a different reaction than pretty much everyone had to the song. There were a lot of people who. Who said, this is awful. Kanye is exalting Hitler and he's a Nazi, and this is terrible, and no one should listen to it. We should take it down. That wasn't my reaction. Similarly, there was a reaction from people who like Hitler and don't like the Jews and said, this is awesome. Kanye's exalting Hitler and he doesn't like the Jews, and everyone should listen to this song. And that also was not my reaction because I listened to the song and because I take Kanye west seriously as a popular artist and I recognize that he actually does have a talent in popular music. And I said, hold on. What's he doing here? And then when you listen to the lyrics, you realize he opens up. He says, they took my bank accounts. They took my kids. I'm hooked on nitrous drugs. I like to watch men be intimate with my woman. And I'm all messed up, man. I'm really messed up. And I can't see my kids. And I became a Nazi. I'm the villain. Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler. All my ninjas are Nazis. Heil Hitler. That's the song. I said, well, that's really interesting because if you just listen to the lyrics, Kanye west is not saying, Hitler's good. If he says, I'm a bad guy now I'm the villain. So therefore, I'm a Nazi. So therefore, Heil Hitler. Then he's saying, the Nazis and Hitler are bad. You don't need an advanced degree in music Criticism or literary criticism to recognize that's what he's saying. It's the plain meaning of what he's saying. So. Well, that's kind of weird. What does that mean? There's a guy who's saying, I got all these problems and I'm not in my right mind. I'm full of wrath and anger and I'm hooked on drugs and I've got all these perversions. I'm in a really bad place and I'm not thinking clearly. So now I'm a Nazi, and I'm the villain. And I said in my review of the song, and I said, yeah, song's kind of a bop, really. Just listening to it, you know, just forget about the lyrics. You just listen to it. It's kind of a bop. And then even the images in the song were really interesting because it was all these black guys wearing animal skins as if to say, we're not human beings. We're not intellectual. We're not using our intellect and our will in a reasonable way. We've just become animals, and we're instinct and wrath and all these things. And I said, the music is interesting. And the lyrics, if you pay attention to them, are interesting too. If you can get past the initial shock of the song, you say, what's he really saying here? There's clearly a more esoteric meaning to the song. And then Kanye west posts this yesterday. He tweets out, I'm done with anti Semitism. Next tweet. I love all people. Next tweet. God forgive me for the pain I've caused. Next tweet. I forgive those who've caused me pain. Next tweet. Thank you, God. Next tweet. And this is the tweet that explains a lot of it. I Simply got a FaceTime from my kids, and I want to save the world again. That last tweet is what should clear up any doubt about whether or not the first tweets were earnest, because you could see a world in which Kanye were being ironic. Yeah, I'm done with anti Semitism. Wink, wink, Heil Hitler or something. But it's not what he. No, no, I'm done with anti Semitism. I love all people. And then you say, God, forgive me the pain I've caused. Would he really just joke about that? It doesn't sound like a joke. I forgive those who've caused me pain. He has been caused pain. And he said, I forgive those. Thank you, God. I don't think he would joke with that kind of a tweet. And then the explanatory tweet. I simply got a single FaceTime call from my kids, and I want to be a good guy again. I want to save the world again. I want to be a good guy. I asked the question, man, I'd love to say, I told you so on this one. I said, the whole point of Kanye's song is I'm the bad guy. And the question that it raises is, how can I be a good guy again? And then he gives the answer right here. This is the answer. Wow. The inciting incident of the song was, I can't see my kids. And now I'm willing to become the worst villain imaginable, which is to say, a Nazi in our mythos. In the popular imagination, I'm gonna. But the obvious question was, how can I be a good guy again? And it gives you the answer. Okay, you fixed the inciting incident. I can see my kids again. Well, thank God. And this. You have to remember that before Kanye did his Hitler album and before he started wearing the KKK uniforms, before he did all that, he did put out an album a few years ago called Jesus Is King, which was, by pop music standards, a pretty beautiful album. And you gotta remember Even now, what, 15, 20 years ago, Kanye put out one of the most popular songs of the 2000s. Jesus walks God, show me the way because the devil's trying to keep me down Jesus walks with me so there's this tension in Kanye's songs, which is why if you judge Kanye based on some tweet or based on some shallow reading of his music, you're gonna miss the good stuff. Because Kanye West. I'm not saying Kanye West. I'm not even saying he doesn't hate the Jews or that he doesn't have Nazi sympathies or whatever. I'm not even denying an exoteric meaning to any of this. I'm not denying that he's hooked on nitrous oxide. I'm not denying that he likes watching men be intimate with his women. I am not denying that he's full of wrath. And his. All the things that he has said, I'm not denying that those things have some kind of literal truth to it. But Kanye west is not primarily a philosopher or a political commentator or a historian or any of that. Kanye west, if he is anything at all, is an artist, a popular artist. And so the value that an artist brings is in his art. When artists start mouthing off about some stupid political campaign or something, they're usually much less interesting. That's not just forget about Kanye. That's true of Taylor Swift or any of these people. We always say, hey, artists, shut your mouths and do your art and stop talking about politics where you have no expertise and where you're not particularly talented. But the value that the artist brings is in the art. And the art that Kanye has made by popular music standards, again, I'm not comparing it with Bach or something, but by popular standards is quite interesting. And for anyone who was paying attention to him as an artist, you would have noticed that that was all there. And so you wouldn't be surprised when Kanye sends out a bunch of tweets like that. Those tweets are a total vindication of the point of view that I was articulating in my take on the song. And again, it doesn't take a genius, really. You just have to recognize who people are and what they're doing. This was the subject of my commencement speech at Ave Maria this year. I said, every commencement speech tells you to go change the world. Don't change the world. That's not primarily your job. Primarily, your job is to interpret the world. This is in the story of Christ visiting Mary and Martha. Mary symbolizes contemplation. Martha, the active life. Christ says to Martha, your sister Mary has the better part. It will not be taken away from her. We don't want to change the world because the world just is as it is. You actually can't change the world because you can't fundamentally change reality. Your job is to see the world as it is and do the right thing within the world. Take the next right step for you. Recognize the meaning behind the world, the great love that moves the sun and the other stars. Allow that, the meaning behind the creation of the world, to change you. And a consequence of this is you'll have lower blood pressure. Okay? Your life will go a lot better when you're not constantly banging your head against the wall because you can't understand the world. And indeed, that was in the Kanye song. He said, I'm just so full of. I'm so angry because he couldn't make sense of the world. He'd lost his sense. And the tweets yesterday signify I'm getting my sense back. Pretty good stuff. No, no, no. He could completely go off the rails tomorrow. I mean, that is something that artists sometimes fall into. But what he's saying here is an answer to the song, I'm the bad guy now. How do I become a good guy again? There's a little bit. You see the Answer just a little bit. One simple phone call. Now, I want to tell you about Harvest Hosts. You know me, I don't take a lot of vacations. Okay, I strongly encourage you right now to go to harvesthosts.com and use code KNOWLES. I finally took a little two days off work, a little quick vacation, as you can tell from my swarthy complexion, and we took a road trip. But it was a really short little road trip. I didn't have a lot. Something that I've wanted to do for a long time. Get in an RV and take a nice long vacation, Clarence Thomas style. Baby in if you rent or own an RV and you are tired of parking your RV in boring concrete jungles, you need Harvest Hosts. With harvest hosts, $79 a year gets you unlimited fee, free overnight stays at 9,500amazing spots across North America. You can wake up at wineries where research is strongly encouraged. Farms, museums, golf courses, even drive in movie theaters. Your home on wheels deserves better. Then another rest stop. Discover cool new places, support local businesses. Finally, use your RV for what it was meant for, actual adventure. Looking at some of their location options makes me want to wrap up the show right now and just go do a little sightseeing. Really, really phenomenal stuff. You could be near national parks, ice skates, all this really, really cool stuff. So between now and May 27, Harvest Hosts has an amazing Memorial Day offer. Head over to harvesthosts.com use code knowles for 30% off your HarvestHosts membership. Once again, harvesthosts.com 30% off by May 27th. Use code knowles so they know I sent you my favorite comment yesterday's from stray 1239 who says reporter, what would it take for you to believe that there is not a genocide in South Africa? Me, if they stopped doing a genocide in South Africa. Yeah, I guess if like major politicians in South Africa stopped chanting kill the boar, shoot to kill, kill the farmer. I guess if they stopped saying that, for instance, that would be one step in the right direction. Or if the sitting president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, doesn't start laughing when President Trump plays that clip in the Oval Office, that would be one of the first things that would tune me in to that. Speaking of art, we turn to artificial intelligence. Speaking of art and the absolute self destruction of the establishment media, the Chicago Sun Times just published a summer reading list for 2025. It's got all sorts of books on there by authors you probably have heard of, some of them at least. There's one problem with the summer reading list. Many of the books don't exist. Was this a big gag? Is this some kind of modern art? No, no, no. They just, they meant to publish a summer reading list. It's just that no one wrote it. The guy who was supposed to write it plugged it into artificial intelligence, one of the AI platforms. And the AI platform spit out an article with a bunch of books that don't exist. And this guy sent it to his editor and then his editor published it. This is not just a student turning in a bad assignment generated by AI. This is not even just an employee turning in some bad work to his boss. With AI, the assignment that the writer turned in was about reading, it was about writing, it was about literature. And no one involved all the way up to publication seems to have read much of anything at all. Absolutely pathetic. I've used AI a little bit. I use it now sometimes more than I use Google. I never use it for writing because it's not good at writing. And I won't use a ghostwriter. I'm very precious about my writing because writing is a reflection of thought. So if I give away my writing, I'm really giving away my thought. But I will use it sometimes for research. Hey, spit me out 20 studies on this subject. Hey, spit me out 10 books that could help point me in the right direction on a subject. And I have to triple check it every time because the AI is not reliable. And sometimes the AI will spit out books that don't exist, citations that are totally false. It's a little better on scientific studies, but maybe a scientific study that doesn't exist. AI can be a great tool to aid in your research. I don't encourage you to use it for your writing because it's bad writing. And more to the point, it will make your writing worse when you actually do have to write the way that people currently use AI is going to make them very, very dumb. If you use AI in order to augment your own learning and your own thought and your own writing, it could be helpful if you're going to use it as the vast majority of people appear to be using it, which is to substitute in for your own reading and substitute in for your own writing, you're going to become a grunting baboon indistinguishable from the dumb idol that you worship. That's what's really happening. I just thought I was talking about this the other day, sweet little Lisa. The way people correspond now. They get an email, get some long document, they have AI read the document for them, then they have AI respond to the document for them, then they send it to someone else. And then the person they're sending it to has AI read it and has AI write. It's just computers talking to each other, and we lose our ability to speak. We certainly lose our ability to write. I've noticed this now for 15, 20 years, just working both as a student and then into the professional world and in politics. People are terrible at writing. People are terrible at spelling these days, and people don't know the fundamentals, the basics of composition. That was before AI hit. You have to be very, very careful. My friend Spencer Clavin made a good point. When the Bible tells us not to worship dumb idols lest we become like them, this is what he's talking about. When we worship the dumb idol, the box of rocks that is AI, we will become like that dumb idol. We'll think we're getting smarter. We will lose our ability to speak, the distinguishing feature of human beings. Speaking of embarrassing moments, Caroline Levitt, press secretary, over the White House just completely destroyed a cnn I'm sorry, an NBC lady, Yamiche, Yamiche something or other, over President Trump's South Africa meeting. Listen to the exchange.