Ye said schools should teach only engineering. Then he spent an hour rewriting history.

On October 24, 2022, Lex Fridman’s podcast published episode 332 with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Around the recording, Twitter had taken him off the platform for an antisemitic post, and Adidas, Balenciaga, and other partners were cutting ties. Fridman introduces him as a legendary artist, producer, and designer. Ye, already in motion, treats the interview as part of a build. He wants Fridman’s eye on two tech companies, Stem Player and Parler, the way album-makers once asked other album-makers for notes.

What follows is two textures in one sitting. In one, a designer talks engineering, architecture, and language with real heat, and he can make a person who does not live in fashion follow a drawing. In the other, he lays out a conspiracy about Jews and the media industry. Fridman interrupts him more than once. At one point he says the phrase *Jewish media* is the language Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, used on the way to murder.

Ye’s respect for engineers starts as a career story. Hollywood, press, and media, he says, are full of voices and faces who never learned to engineer a product, and that is why he could jump the entertainment field to a net worth he puts at eleven billion. He wants to stop hanging the word Black on that number. Calling himself the richest Black man of all time, he says, feeds the same “trauma economy” he associates with Black Lives Matter. The only subject schools should teach, he concludes, is engineering. History and anything subjective should be recess. Forced subjective information, in his phrasing, exists to weaken and indoctrinate the species.

Fridman pushes back immediately. Interpretation of history can be subjective, he says, but history has facts, and those facts ground the way you do engineering. Ye does not accept the split. He does not fully believe in any concept of the future or the past, because history was written by the victors. If the same day’s events are already reported wrong, he asks, how wrong is a story a thousand years old, and why argue about something that is not now? Now is the only thing everyone can agree on. Fridman tries to keep a limited use for history: so you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. Ye’s reply is that the biggest mistake from the past is looking at the past.

He wants a line written down, widescreen, for Ridley Scott: you are a being with engineering opportunities. He has always ranked himself among the top five writers in human existence; this sentence, he says, pushes him to three or four. Asked who is first, he treats the ranking as factual, not subjective. One person wrote some 30 percent of the English language. Another led some 30 percent of the products we use. Fridman supplies the names: Shakespeare, then Steve Jobs. Influence, they agree, is the main metric. Greatness, Fridman adds, is more than a bank account. It is impact on the collective intelligence of the species. Ye writes that down.

When the headlines pause, Ye says, he thinks about family and about Kim Kardashian. He reaches for Super Mario Bros.: King Koopa has her in the castle, you fight to the level, you sing the song wrong, and they take the princess again. Fridman asks which one he is. Mario, he says. Asked what he loves most about her, he talks in materials. She is a mix of Robert Kardashian and Kris Jenner, “a really high pool,” two geniuses. Some people, he adds, just have high DNA. He names Ivanka Trump. Fridman asks about his own. Look at my mom and my dad, Ye says. It has been proven.

His father, he says, runs a water-purification center in the Dominican Republic and is “the original Steve Jobs,” blocked by people around him, used, and not believed. The educated version of Ye. One engine of his ambition is almost comic in its frankness. He found his father’s Playboy at five, and it greatly affected his motivation. Another: when Pharrell first appeared in videos, Ye’s girlfriend said girls liked Pharrell, and he wanted girls to like him too. Fridman hears the desire to be loved, at the individual level of being noticed and at the societal level of being widely loved. Ye says he has moved past that, late-career Nikola Tesla rather than a dinner seat next to Anna Wintour. The job now is getting the idea across.

Are you happy, Fridman asks. Absolutely, Ye says. It is difficult to make him unhappy. Frustration he can handle. When it arrives, it is because he allowed people into his life who should not be there, they did the thing he already knew they would do, and he is screaming at them when he needs to scream at himself. Anger, in that frame, is a problem in him that has to be dealt with. In this stretch he sounds like a person taking inventory. It is also the highest-clarity passage in the episode, sitting beside claims that do not survive contact with numbers.

On paper he sketches new “living cells.” Forty thousand square feet, a person drawn for scale, a hole at the top he calls a mouth, another point a belly button. Light, air, and water come in from above. He wants to start talking in meters, restore what he calls the Tower of Basel, and treat human beings as God’s iPhone, His greatest creation. Adjacent cells would sit next to each other. Fridman asks for the vision. Happiness, Ye says. Motivation, somewhere in the back of his mind, is family. If Moses struck the rock and God kept him from the promised land, the promised land is family. Family is heaven on Earth. If God does not let him have his family back, the mission is still to promote families at all costs and make their existence easier.

The practical layer is a localized farm inside the community, then a partnership with big agriculture — he says “big pharma,” then talks food — arguing they will make more money by making better food. Everyone knows, he says, that pesticides and the medical industry keep Americans sick. McDonald’s makes food that kills people. Coca-Cola sells sugar water. He adds, in case he has not pissed off enough people in power. He wants the idea open-sourced so engineers and “anointed beings” can contribute. A constant regenerative water system would keep the pool from going still. Two rooms: a dry room, the old living room, and a wet room, toilet close to the moving water.

Why current buildings cannot deliver happiness is, in his account, industrial. They were based on industry and the economy, then people leaned into whatever they were used to seeing. Attractiveness follows the same loop: media goes and gets Bella Hadid, Kim Kardashian, Emily Ratajkowski. He admits it is subjective, then draws a circle around his own taste. The only men who could argue with him about women, he says, are Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, because they have a track record. Everyone else is offering an opinion. He has history.

He hates when people use *they*, because *they* get blamed for everything. Who is *they*, exactly? Fridman says the problem is that they is us. Ye loves that. What we need, he says, is to turn I into we so we take the responsibility, and they into us so we take the accountability. Say your truth out loud, nonviolently — he repeats the word as a shout-out to Alex Jones and Donald Trump, who, he says, get accused of inciting violence when they speak. Free thought, in that telling, has been criminalized. The formula is sharp. Put the same man an hour later, naming a people as the force that wrecks artists, and the formula is also a rebuttal of himself.

The pattern cutter is the small war that makes the larger one visible. Ye wants her gone because he felt she was copying patterns into the computer, and he wanted to do them by hand. Fridman translates: automating the patterns? Yes. For Ye it is a war of human beings and robots. Fridman, who makes robots, says he is deeply offended, then marks it as a joke. Ye says robots have feelings too, also a joke, and they flag the line for future robots. Under the gag is a real split. Ye wants the thing that cannot be copied, that belongs to one pair of hands. Fridman’s work is to make things copyable. Neither of them plans to move.

Ye offers a condition: technology and the original human species can exist in peace, as long as the people who know how to make robots are not using those robots to control humans. Fridman catches it. That, he says, is why engineering is not everything, and why you have to study the lessons of history. In Nazi Germany, science was used to create atrocities. Engineering can be a tool of war. The line connects two distant parts of the conversation. Ye has spent the opening arguing that history should not be in school. He will spend the next hour using a historical story to support his conclusions. What he opposes is other people’s version. He wants the pen.

Ye does not take the warning. “We are still in the Holocaust,” he says. A Jewish friend told him to visit the Holocaust Museum. His response was, let’s visit our Holocaust museum, Planned Parenthood. Fridman, who grew up in the Soviet Union, is Jewish, and has family who perished in Nazi Germany, says he has to push back. There is a difference, at that scale, at that time, against an entire people. Ye reaches for numbers: six million in the Holocaust, more than twenty million by abortion. African Americans, he adds, are also Jew, the lost tribe of Israel. Fridman can push back on that too. Ye says everyone came from Africa, they are brothers, and he is a follower of the idea — Fridman names the Black Hebrew Israelites — in his own version.

Then the claim that has to be separated from the feeling. Fifty percent of Black deaths a year, Ye says, is abortion. Not the cop with the knee, not gang violence, not heart attacks. “The most dangerous place for a Black person in America is in their mother’s stomach.” He adds that George Soros would use a Black trauma economy to win an election. Fridman answers with a figure of his own: 900,000 to a million abortions in the United States a year. He hears Ye. He will not stack that next to the rape, torture, murder, and humiliation of World War II. Ye says the difference is not the number. The numbers still matter, because one of them is roughly real and the other is not.

U.S. abortions in a typical recent year sit in that 900,000-to-one-million band Lex named. The claim that half of Black deaths are abortions is invented. In American cause-of-death statistics, the leading killers of Black Americans are heart disease, cancer, COVID, accidental injury. Abortion is not in that accounting. Ye has merged a pregnant person’s death with a terminated pregnancy and called the blend a body count. The Soros line sits in the same frame: an assertion with no evidence, dropped into a story that already has a villain. He leaves himself an exit. He could Andy Kaufman another seven minutes, he says, as the person who does not have to feel your pain because he has unrecognized pain too. In every interview, when he asks why he got to the tweet, no one wants to understand the path. The need to be heard is real. It does not carry a charge against a people, and it does not make the data true.

When Ye says Jewish media, Fridman hears an echo of pain that reminds a whole people of a dark time. It is language Goebbels used, said so many times on the way to murder and torture that it rings wrong, the way the N-word does in some mouths. Ye’s move is to take the identity: he is not Jewish, he is Jew, blood of Christ, Orthodox Christian. If Jewish people would accept that, he says, they would hear him differently. Fridman keeps returning to Martin Luther King. He has a dream too: that a person is judged by the content of their character, not by being Black or Jew. “All the assholes that fucked you over in the music industry,” he says, “are individuals. They’re not Jews.” They are humans with opportunities who took those opportunities. Ye answers that they are Jewish. Fridman says he does not care.

Ye will not drop the modifier. A Jewish trainer, a Jewish doctor: bipolar diagnosis, medication, then the press. Wear the wrong color hat, he says, and the line is that he is off his meds, a scarlet letter. Four Jewish members, in his count, controlled his voice, because 90 percent of Black people in entertainment — sports, music, acting — are in some way tied to Jewish business people. Like Rom next to Obama or Jared next to Trump, “there’s a Jewish person right there controlling the country.” Fridman calls it a dog whistle. When a large voice says Jewish media, people who already have hate in their hearts aim it at Jewish people. Does Ye feel that hate come to the surface? Ye feels, instead, that Jewish people in media will not take accountability. He names Ari Emanuel’s letter in the *Financial Times*, an attempt, he says, to take food out of his children’s mouths. He has already, on Piers Morgan or Chris Cuomo, separated Jewish business people from their families. Fridman says that was a shitty apology.

The practical advice Fridman keeps repeating is engineering, not stereotype. Have the balls to call out the individuals by name. Start a war against those people. They are not Jewish. Ye asks if Fridman will help. Sure, Fridman says. Assholes are everywhere; he does not know the industry well. Ye’s proposed fix is to put the top ten executives and the top ten talent in sports, film, and music — Tom Brady, Taylor Swift, Adele, not all Black — next to their contracts, transparently, and re-engineer the deal like a new constitution. His father begged him at nineteen not to enter music. He has been through it, made money somewhere else, watched his name, family, and reputation get destroyed, and come back as a being with engineering opportunities. When he actually aims at a person, Howard Stern, Fridman lights up. That, he says, is much better than calling Jewish media. Go after individuals. Ye calls it the engineer’s approach.

He still will not say there is no Jewish media. Fridman tells him, as someone who cares, that the words about Jews are not the words of a samurai. Ye once said George Bush does not care about Black people. In the same key, Fridman says, Ye does not care about Jewish people: he is feeding hate groups. Ye says he already apologized. It was not good enough. Just say it was wrong, Fridman asks. There is no Jewish media, no Jewish control of the media. Ye says an engineer who is not holding to the truth is not engineering. Fridman says that is hate, not engineering. Stereotypes exist for a reason, Ye says. Engineers don’t do stereotypes, Fridman says. They let you channel hate toward the other. A veteran at Cheesecake Factory told Ye the country has forgotten it is on the same side. Ye offers himself as punching bag for the day. Fridman still will not grant the premise. The world, he says, is bigger than the boardrooms over contracts. Build another label. Ye hears control of his narrative, the same people who told him not to wear a red hat.

The personal history he wants understood is a fashion history. At Virgil Abloh’s funeral, a white pastor who had married Ye and Kim talked for half the service. Ye was not allowed to speak. What he wanted to tell A$AP Rocky and others in the room was: don’t let them split the gang up. He lists the second Yeezy show as proof of what the gang was. Justin Bieber in the second row, Kim, Kris, Kendall, Kylie’s first show, Kylie next to Bella Hadid, Diddy and Drake in the same building, Jay-Z breaking up a fight backstage. Jerry Lorenzo, Kim’s Skims, Virgil at Louis Vuitton, Demna at Balenciaga, all working, in Ye’s telling, for him. Jay-Z, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Anna Wintour in the seats. Then Bernard Arnault, one of the richest men in the world, “caught wind of this.”

Arnault, Ye says, politely offered backing: the group would take 51 or 49 percent, with control, and Louis Vuitton support. Ye went to Adidas to indemnify the apparel. He asked Alexandre Arnault for a written contract from his father first. “My dad will never go back on his word.” Three months in, Anna Wintour picks the lawyer; the lawyer, Ye later learned, demanded a plane during negotiations. Alexandre calls: the deal dropped at the board. He tells his wife. He still puts on collections, takes over Madison Square Garden, starts a show an hour late. A week later Kim is robbed. Scooter Braun tells him to make more money instead of going to Japan. Four more shows, exhaustion, hospital, a bipolar diagnosis he says he has not taken medication for in two years. Then Arnault hires his best friend, his main engineer. They broke the gang up. If that had not happened, he says, Virgil is alive and he is still married. A French colonizer caught it early. God is alive, and he is anointed.

Fridman hears a man playing victim to the forces he claims to stand against. Ye says he is fighting a spiritual battle, a bright part of God’s army, pro-life, pro-God, Jesus Christ as Lord. Jewish or not, Fridman says, the stance is still playing victim. Ye will not take the frame. The greatest gift is life itself. The story he has just told is full of named men, dropped deals, and a friend’s death. It is also the story he keeps loading onto an ethnic plot. The names were available. He had just been asked to use them.

Another hit, Fridman says, is Balenciaga pulling out, and a close friendship with the creative director. Ye quotes Future: he never feels pain, he has felt too much. The day he went to Nashville to announce Parler with George Farmer, Balenciaga was taking his imagery down and *Drink Champs* was being pulled. He calls it the happiest day of his life. He loves cutting the grass low. People who were part-time switch up in wartime. He would rather have the people who are really with him. Fridman warns him to be careful of whoever tries to get close now. Ye has more to say. Demna will still work for Ye someday. They have talked. Kindred spirits. He brought Demna to Gap to engineer product for people at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, twenty dollars a piece. Gap did not want that. Balenciaga did not want that. Agendas were not aligned. Celebrities, he says, get brought into Fortune 500 companies for influence, not to let someone think he is Steve Jobs.

He puts numbers on the friendship. He spent somewhere between five and ten million dollars of his own money on Balenciaga. How much had Balenciaga paid him in two years? Fridman guesses down from 1.2 million to zero. Zero, Ye says. Two weeks earlier he had paid $862,000 in store royalties out of his own pocket. He had paid Demna three million, out of the Gap marketing fund, for a collection that was supposed to be 100 to 160 styles and arrived at about 60. He did not want to hire Demna. He wanted to compete with him, the way he made “Stronger” because his fiancée liked Justin Timberlake a little too much, then had to go to Timbaland for the drums that would hit in a club. He feels a parallel: going to Timbaland, and now asking a Jewish engineer to look at the contracts artists live under. Houston, he says, we have a problem. Being called Hitler for saying it out loud does not negate the problem. Fridman says the hate created by how he said it is not a jest.

Design, when they finally get there, is tactile. Fridman has read that Ye and Demna talked about buttons for hours. They speak in Shrek. A zipper hoodie, Ye says, replaces the dress shirt because you can still do the Vegas unbutton. A pullover cannot. The planet is a constraint: he takes responsibility, as the most influential designer of all time in his own ranking, to use biodegradable clothing, and elastic is the problem, so jeans and a belt may beat a waistband. Fridman restates it as engineering under planetary limits. Ye cannot leave the earlier subject alone. That could almost make Jewish people like him again, he says. Fridman sighs and recommends books on the Holocaust. Would you read books on the current Holocaust Black people are in, Ye asks, meaning abortion and eugenics. Fridman has read short-form writing and listened to debates. When life begins, for him as an engineer, is a hard philosophical question. Ye wants to talk population control, forty acres and a mule, and a sportswear factory in Cody, the first in America since World War II in his telling.

The hat says 24. If he ran for president, Fridman asks, what ideas would he represent? Beings with engineering opportunities. On the last run he held one rally and let people come up. It is our responsibility, he says, to listen to pain, even when we caused it, as with the tweet. Professors with degrees have been canceled and have nowhere to go, no fan base, no shoe line, no ex-wife. They end up at Starbucks. Even a voice about anger and hate, Fridman asks, still deserves to be heard? Yes, Ye says, and we deserve to ask why. He keeps puncturing the solemnity with dick jokes. Fridman lets them land as humor, a catalyst for love, the way people in Ukraine, just back from war, still laugh. Censorship, Fridman says, is what humor dies under. Anthony Jeselnik crosses every line and that is why he is a genius. Ye notes that most comedians he knows did not vote for Trump, even if they have an appreciation for the sense of humor.

Fridman tries to get to Parler’s engineering and cannot hold the other subject down. Do not say Jewish media, he says again. It sounds too much like 1930s Nazi Germany leading up to atrocities. JM, Ye offers. Fridman says the implied, memeified prejudice toward a group is what leads to hate. Ye counters with BLM: a death on camera, chosen by media, while kids die in Chicago every week without that spread, a martyr, a city turned into a war zone, a higher-level agenda. Fridman grants the mechanism and changes the noun. The media, not the Jewish media. That machine takes tragedy and pushes it toward whatever narrative gets clicks. Politicians do the same. Ye’s version is that the idea of antisemitism, and the closeness of the Holocaust, is used by certain individuals in media to avoid accountability for bad business. Eight people who happened to be Jewish, in his story, colluded on the tour and the next house, and at the end of the tour he did not have the money. Pointing that out, he says, is not antisemitism. It is like pointing out that Kardashian Christmases always happened at Kris’s house.

Talk in groups, Fridman says, and you breed hate. Talk about individuals and you solve problems. That is engineering. Ye says he is sorry to the people hurt and affected by that, and he is looking to solve it. He had the conversations before the tweet. Then Ari Emanuel did in public, he says, what had been done behind closed doors. They told Candace Owens he could not be on The Daily Wire. The media’s demand, as he hears it, is apologize and do not explain, so Mel Gibson can make more films. No one is looking at the problem that led so many people to that frustration. He will not back up until it changes. Fridman is not asking because of the media. He is asking because he cares, and because a great man, on Martin Luther King’s terms, does not talk about Jews or Black people. He talks about engineering and humanity. He builds a new label, a new design firm, a new social network. He does not come from resentment. Ye asks if it is okay to call out collusion. Bernard Arnault offered a deal and took it away, he says, because Ye was too powerful with that collective in one room. For people in business, whatever their background, “whether they turn their cell phones off on Friday or not,” there has been bad practice. More people in this game, he says, end up beaten than rich. One person has tried to find out why he was frustrated enough to send the tweet. That, he says, is fucked up.

Fridman’s version of great engineering has two requirements. Surround your personal life with people you trust. Surround the professional life with an incredible team. Everything else — other groups, collusion, the long grievance — drops away if you can work around it. Find people you can be with for a whole life, not a summer. Does Ye have people he really trusts? No. He trusts God. People are flawed. Agendas align or they do not. When Kim was pulled far to the left, the marriage became impossible. The world, he says, is more transactional every day, and marriages were originally transactions. King Koopa, in this telling, is the media, the politics, the promise of safety. He is frustrated with Kris Jenner for never really giving Kim’s hand over, for remaining the husband to her daughters. Fridman asks if anyone close can call him out on his bullshit. What’s my bullshit, Ye asks. Jewish media, Fridman says. That is not bullshit, Ye says. They go up a register. I don’t fucking trust you, Ye says. Fridman, who says no one has ever said that to him, is actually hurt. Find people you can trust, he says. Don’t tell me what I should do, Ye says. I’m not one of your BLM marchers.

They land again on abortion, George Floyd, and what Ye calls population control. Fridman watched Candace Owens’s documentary, thinks it is important to question mainstream narratives, and still believes Floyd died from the cop’s knee, not fentanyl. Even if that were the case, Ye says, 50 percent of Black deaths are abortion. Fridman asks how you fix that. Speak to the community, he suggests. Value family. Ye says he was building shelters, land in Calabasas, ranches in Wyoming, monasteries that do not turn people away, farms, clothing, water, and knowledge first, because knowledge is the resource that lets you find water. His people are sick: the rap charts, the calories in opportunity-zone restaurants, obesity at Denny’s, an overweight Black woman held up as body goals. Seventy-two percent of Black mothers, he says, are raising children alone, crack and guns and locked-up fathers, a Tuskegee-shaped agenda. He asks whether an all-Black company would sound antisemitic. Fridman is generally against that kind of thing, and has not met a Black engineer who wants to be called a Black engineer. You want the best person for the job. Ye says the world is sick, and the way business has been done to him is keeping it that way. Fix it, Fridman says. People should not doubt Ye. It still hurt when you said you don’t trust me.

What do you hope your legacy is? To be forgotten. Who designed the sidewalk, the water fountain, the stop sign, the stoplight? If the idea is good, it is a God idea, and no VC can own it. Advice for young people: don’t tweet while you’re sleepy, unless you buy your own social platform the next week. Fridman wants more. Do everything you feel, Ye says, even if you are told it is the wrong thing — not anything violent. Trust your gut, because that instinct is who God made you to be, not what lines up with frat brothers or a father or classmates. Be like water. Be, because we are beings with engineering opportunities. Fridman has hope that Ye has the capacity to add love to the world. Ye sees a deal: two people with pain, two platforms, Parler and whatever Elon does with Twitter, doppelgangers sharing notes. Fridman wants a platform that helps people maximize long-term happiness, not just division. Healthy conversations, Ye says. Look at ten versions of any story, not one.

Does he regret giving everything to the vision? He says he had to stop envying cool people in their cool time. Naming them, flashing a light, is a war technique, compliments as aging. At forty-five he is still the bad kid in the principal’s office, and that, he says, is why he is the most influential person in fashion: he refuses to leave. God, then me, then fuck everybody. He is full of contradictions and knows it. Some days a monk, some days Hennessy. He texts Kim that she may not understand what he is doing right now, but she will. There are people who want the world to stay as it is and people who want to change it. Da Vinci, he says, could not suffer fools and would walk out of a conversation. That is why it is the Da Vinci code and not the Da Vinci world. Every time he pisses off a group, he might be turning a world vision into a code — or opening conversations with new friends he may trust someday. Fridman tells him to think in years and decades. People will judge the conversation in the present. That does not matter.

Then he tries an apology again, and he is specific about why. Not because he is holding it hostage. God asks us to be judgmental the way a doctor’s judgment saves a grandmother. The Da Vinci story is enough, he says, for a sincere apology to Jewish people, because he believes there is a code inside his misspellings that God wants in the world. When he is in his own way, he is in God’s way. Pointing at others for not listening is easier than noticing he is not listening. Before God, as a samurai, he says he is sorry for hurting you as a Jewish person, sorry for how that made you feel, sorry to a population he also calls his brothers. He did not, he says, get called to alienate. America is the youngest superpower, the influencer of the planet. In his position he can talk to Trump one day and sit at a game with Kim the next. Divisive language, proving he can be as racist as a racist white person, is not what God called him to do. Causing people to hurt is not helping. That means a more sophisticated approach to engineering the problem. Would it be more genuine to call it a mistake? He does not want to be a hypocrite. He will call it a mistake to be genuine about the feeling, and then say God makes no mistakes, because if he had not made that mistake he would not be sitting here. That, he adds, is not a justification of the sleepy text.

Fridman hears a man with love in his heart, explicit and implicit, and says the way to engineer a better future is with love. As one human to another: I love you, brother. Ye says he likes him too. Fridman calls him a son of a bitch, and they laugh. The credits close on Ye’s own line: nothing in life is promised except death. What is worth taking from the two hours is not a conclusion about media or design. It is a method. Watch the moment a world-class maker stops offering evidence and keeps the same tone. Separate the albums and the clothes, which you can test, from the history and the medicine, which here were mostly assertion. When someone names a people, look up who used the phrase and what it was used for. When someone names a number, look it up. You can take a person’s pain seriously and still refuse the charge they built on top of it. Fridman spent a day in that tension. Both halves were sitting in the same chair.