Let's talk about Kanye. So I'm seeing a lot of people forwarding around on the Don Lemon show on CNN, and Bakari Sellers was an African-American pundit. He was on there a lot. And Bakari said some mean things about Kanye. But one of the things he said was that his problem with Kanye is that, this is Bakari Sellers saying this about Kanye, you're saying that his problem is that anti-intellectualism isn't cool. So he's sort of mocking Kanye for not doing his homework before getting involved in stuff.

And you know, I tweeted that it probably, that's the sort of thinking that gets Kanye elected in 2024.

So let's talk about Kanye, because wherever he is, it just makes you think of all different topics. You think about that. Think of how many things you think about when you think of Kanye. It's like now it's this growing universe of things you think about because his influence is just expanding like crazy.

And the first thing I thought about when he was accused of anti-intellectualism is how does that anti-intellectualism work? The intellectuals said to Hillary Clinton would be president. They said the economy would fail. They said that you know all of our allies would hate us. Trade would be bad. There'd be nuclear war. Pretty much everything the intellectuals told us would happen, including what Bakari Sellers, the pro-intellectual pundit, was predicting, every one of them was wrong for the past three years.

Who were the people who were right? Anti-intellectuals. Anti-intellectuals have been right about everything for about three years straight now. I saw, I suppose it depends how far you take your definition of anti-intellectual. If you take that all the way to dumb, I don't know how right the dumb people were. But I think even the dumb people, the people who were literally low IQ if you measure it here, I'm not insulting, I'm just saying that if you measure people's IQ, there's high ones and low ones. I think even the low IQ people were smarter than the intellectuals for the past three years. Maybe they were just lucky. Maybe they were just lucky. But they were right about a lot of stuff.

So I had a few feelings about this. First of all, calling Kanye an anti-intellectual is sort of part of the package of accusing him of being an unprepared celebrity as opposed to someone who's been chugging away in the government realm for years. And I call that Loserthink, which might be the title of my new book. Loserthink is a way of thinking that consistently gives you bad results.

And let's take the difference between the way Kanye apparently thinks. I can't read his mind, but we'll just look at what he does as an indication of what he thinks. What Kanye does is he breaks out of his small field and he tries things for which he is totally unqualified. How qualified was Kanye before he became Kanye? Even Kanye wasn't qualified to be Kanye. I mean in a sense that he had never been a famous rapper and then he became one. You know, is that even the right word? Or his hip-hop artist or just artist or just artist I guess. And then he decides to be a designer. What was his experience for being a designer? Nothing. Nothing. And now he's one of the most successful designers. What is his experience for anything? Kanye is not stopped by his lack of beginning knowledge.

So beginning knowledge is the key here. How much knowledge did President Trump have about being president before he was president? Not much. Just like everybody else, because nobody has practice being a president until they're the president. How much does President Trump know about the job of being a president right now, two years into it? A lot. He figured it out, right? He brought his own tools into the job and figured it out.

So who do you want? The person who can figure it out? A Trump, Kanye, lots of other people, right? People who are willing to change fields. It's one thing to be a celebrity and just talking about politics and you know people don't have a lot of respect for celebrities who just talk. But Kanye is not just talking. He is literally getting ready to meet with Jared Kushner and with the president on one of the most intractable problems in the entire country, which is how to put convicted ex-cons back to work, how to reduce our prison population. These are really hard problems. And Kanye walks right into it because you know what's missing? Do you know why that's such a hard problem? Well one of the reasons probably is a lack of creativity. In other words we probably don't have yet the right ideas to get us the right result. Or if we do have the right ideas, and you know I know that Jared Kushner has some plans about reducing the prison population and putting people back to work, if we have a good plan and we're having trouble selling it, who would you want on your side to help you sell it? Kanye freaking West, now known as Ye. Or yeh? I don't know how to pronounce Ye. So I guess yeh.

So if you're asking me who was being one of the most productive people in the country this week, think about it. Ye. I'm still having trouble. Here's my problem with saying yeh. Yeh feels like even though he's officially announced that's what he wants to be called, I have trouble with it because I associated it with people who know him personally. Because it seems like the people who have known him personally call him yeh for a long time. And that to me, I don't know him personally, so it feels like I know it just feels too personal. But if that's what he wants.

So who's being one of the most productive citizens in the United States this week? Ye, right? He's meeting with Jared. He's bringing attention to one of the most intractable problems in the world. He's talking about bringing some manufacturing to Chicago, his future, his hometown in future new town he's moving apparently. Who is bringing all that attention to the issue? Does all of that attention help Jared refine his ideas if he needs to? Probably. Probably. You bring that much creativity into a topic and suddenly people start thinking of stuff. It's contagious. All right. Did it bring more attention to it which will help him sell it? Absolutely.

What did Bakari Sellers do that was productive this week? He criticized the most productive citizen in the nation. Now when I say he's the most productive citizen in the nation, what I'm talking about is the fact he's not an elected politician, right? There are lots of elected people who are doing good work. But as an unelected person, who's doing more for the country this week like right in front of our eyes than Ye? He's done an unambiguously positive thing by bringing attention to a major problem.

And now of course when you're talking about politics and you're talking about left and right and CNN and Fox News and all that, Bakari Sellers is on essentially, he's on a team. And he's criticizing Kanye who he's feeling is either not on his team or maybe more of a MAGA fan, etc.

I don't think that's the case by the way. But he's criticizing him. Who do you see supporting Kanye the most? What identifiable group of people are most supportive of Kanye, Ye? All right, it's a trick question. The people most supportive of Ye as being a positive force in the world are white supremacists. Now I don't mean that literally. I don't literally mean white supremacists are supporting Ye. What I mean is that Trump supporters, and they've been branded of course as all a bunch of white supremacists. So if you're on the left, how do you square the fact that there's a panel of black people criticizing Ye every day on CNN and the people who are unambiguously positive about him is the party that that panel of black people have branded as white supremacists? How do they explain that? Well how do you square that? Because if I look at my Twitter feed you know there's some people who don't like Kanye, some do. But unambiguously there's more positive than negative. How do you square that if you think all Trump supporters are white supremacists? Why are they so positive about Ye?

Well I'll tell you, because he's not against them. He doesn't present a threat. He presents more of an opportunity. More of a hey this could be good. Yeah, what's he bringing to the table? I like new ideas.