ify the means? Yes, yes. Because the lie was just talk and nuclear war is you exploding in a giant fireball of radiation and fire. Those are not equal.

So when people say, "Oh, you're saying the ends justify the means," they always do if you do it right. If the ends don't justify the means, well what the hell were you going after those means for? What were you going after those ends for? What was the point of going after the ends if it was going to cost just as much to get them as the benefit? So think in terms of cost-benefit analysis. Don't think of bumper stickers. A bumper sticker is just about greens. But a thinking person says, all right, there are things I don't like about this, but this is a pretty big benefit. That's worth it.

Bum bum. Do you buy into the new QAnon conspiracy? QAnon is horoscope. So your horoscope will look like it is correct quite often.

What do you think of it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission? Yeah, that's another bumper sticker. So people say, well, it's easier to ask forgiveness than ask for permission. Let me give you my general answer to that. It kind of depends. There's no doubt that there are some situations in which it's better just to do it and get in trouble and deal with it. Certainly that's true.

Let me give you the best example of where it's better to ask for forgiveness: Uber. The company when they first started, they actually didn't really know that there would be so many regulations and laws and cab medallions and all that stuff that would make it really impossible to do their business. If Uber had been stopped by all those rules that said no, it's actually illegal, you can't even do this, it's literally illegal—if that had stopped Uber, there would be no Uber. But instead they just went ahead and did it anyway, got big enough, got successful enough, got enough goodwill, changed the world enough that by the time the lawmakers and the law enforcers caught up with them it was sort of too late. Then they had already succeeded to the point where you just couldn't put the genie back in the bottle easily. They had deep funding by then. They had lawyers by then. They had lobbyists. So they got too big too quickly. And that was probably the best example ever of it's better to do it first and ask for forgiveness later. Because they broke some rules, but you wouldn't have Uber without it. You just wouldn't.

And there are a number of other companies that you'll see there was something similar in their origin story where they just did something you weren't supposed to do and then they just figured it out. They just figured out how to deal with it after the fact.

Well, calling Kim Jong-un honorable. Work absolutely. Absolutely. Calling Kim Jong-un honorable is solid persuasion because it helps to solidify him into a keeping-your-promise kind of a model. So there's actually research. Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence. That if you can just get people to repeat something out loud it becomes true to them. So if you—and it's so ridiculous that the examples were kind of mind-boggling. I think the example was if you go to people randomly and say, "Can you write a report—this is just a study—can you write a paragraph supporting climate science," or whatever the topic was. And they would pick people who already agreed with it, what they were going to write, and then some people who did not agree with it but just went along. It's an all right, I'll write a paragraph in support of