Kanye 'Ye' West Interview | Lex Fridman Podcast #332

The following is a conversation with Yay, the legendary artist, producer, and designer formerly known as Kanye West, on this The Lex Friedman podcast.

"Based off of our connection and just you being a friend, I need to show you my two tech companies and get your perspective on it, because now I have friends that can give a perspective. Like, when I would work on albums, I had other friends that worked on albums, and they would give me their perspectives on it. You wanna do this? We are doing it. This is part of it. This is part of it, absolutely.

All right, beautiful. Oh, what I wanted to finish the thing is okay, you're going to ask me different questions. But I'm about growing and building and bringing the idea to life. So when I see you, I say, 'Oh, this guy understands how to hire Engineers.' Where I'm coming from? Coming from Hollywood, coming from press, coming from media. All of the guys, you know, that so many of the guys that have been like voices and faces and Talking Heads, whatever, have not understood how to engineer product.

And that's the reason why I was able to jump past everyone in the entertainment field and become, um, you know, whatever the net worth is, 11 billion. I'ma stop putting the whole black thing on my worth. Like, let's just see where I am on the scale of life because that's a cop-out for me to say Richest black guy of all time, because that's feeding into the same, you know, trauma economy that Black Lives Matter feeds into.

That's why I love and respect Engineers. That's the only thing that we really need to teach in school is engineering. We don't need to teach history. We don't need to teach anything that is subjective. It needs to only be engineering taught in school, and everything else needs to be recessed. Nothing at all. Any force subjective information is just to weaken and indoctrinate our species, and that's what schools do.

Now, as an engineer, I love hearing you say that. But to push back, history is not... the interpretation of history might be subjective, but history has some facts, and they're useful to give a grounding to the way you do engineering.

I don't 100% believe in anything—any concept of the future or any concept of history. Because history was just written by the victors. Yeah, so if I see stuff happen on the day, that later that day is reported wrong, so how wrong is something reported a thousand years ago? And why would we argue about something that's not in the now? Because that's the only thing that everyone can agree upon is that it is now, right now.

Yo, you try not to make the mistakes of the past. That's the usefulness of history. The limited usefulness. The biggest mistake from the past that we keep making is looking at the past too much, giving too much value to the past. Too much value to the past. We are now, we are now, we are here. We are one species. We are one race. We're here, and it's time. And the leadership is changing because you have Elon as a leader, Yay as a leader, and we are the top leaders. We're more influential than the presidents.

So, you're a human being with engineering challenges before you. With a stunning player, with parlor, what's the hardest thing in front of you on the engineering front? That's the first sentence that any of our species needs to hear when they're born: 'You Are a Human Being with engineering challenges.'

And I consider challenges to be opportunities in front of you. Yeah, literally. Like, let me see a piece—I need to write that down. That's the beginning of our new species Constitution. I'm gonna do the paper like this. Why put in widescreen? This is for Ridley.

Um, uh, you are—no, let me like you are a being with engineering opportunities. Or challenges? Opportunities. I'm sorry, I don't spell as good as John Legend. Opportunities. And be for you. I like the before because it can mean as you can mean forward or before you.

This right here, I've always said I'm the top five writer in human existence, but at this, like this right here is pushing me to like number four, number three. It's a good one because who would you say is the top in—it's top writing in human existence? We know who it is. That's subjective. Who's tha..."