you live in California you're surrounded by people of dubious citizenship all the time and you come to know them and love them and trust them and work with them. And so emotionally, personally, and in every non-rational level I'm very, very pro that population. And so I sort of stayed out of the sanctuary city conversation because it doesn't feel like a good system but the alternative isn't great either because, you know, you've got some downside both ways. At least there's an argument for it, right? You know, at least there's an argument for going either way.

But now that I hear that it might be protecting fentanyl dealers I'm starting to change my opinion because that is far too big a risk. If we actually can find fentanyl dealers we need to start executing them. And I'm absolutely pro execution for the very big fentanyl dealers, not the local street people who are just doing some low-level damage. I'm talking about the big dealers of fentanyl need to be executed. That should be absolutely true because if we had somebody who used a gun to kill a hundred people you pretty much execute that person. And fentanyl crosses a bunch of borders so it seems like it would necessarily be a federal thing. I think the federal government can just kill all of them. And I think that China needs to start executing its own drug dealers a little bit more publicly because that would help us a lot.

Scott wants to pull the lever. I would pull the lever if somebody gave me the option of pulling the lever to execute a fentanyl, like a major dealer, not somebody who just was a user and was selling to support their own habit or something like that. Because those people just need help. But a major dealer of fentanyl, I could pull that handle so easily. You know, you think to yourself I would feel bad forever because I killed, I took a life. Nope, wouldn't even feel a little bit bad. It would be a good day being the person who actually killed a fentanyl dealer. That would be a good day for me. Which is probably why we shouldn't have the death penalty. I think I accidentally gave you a really good argument for not having the death penalty. Because the very fact that I'm being honest with you, for this specific crime of killing hundreds of people with your drug that you know is going to kill hundreds of people, for that specific crime I could kill them with joy. Yeah, that's a pretty good argument for not having a death penalty, frankly. So I can see it from both sides.

What if he was later found innocent? You know, depends what you mean by innocent. It seems unlikely that a major drug dealer would be found later not to have been a major drug dealer. Usually when somebody's found innocent after the fact it's because they did a specific crime. You know, they either murdered somebody or didn't. A single act, that's the sort of thing you could definitely have a mistaken identity. But if you take down a major drug dealer and you've got a whole network of people reporting, yeah this is the guy, the odds of having a mistaken identity with a major drug dealer pretty low.

Somebody's asking about Jordan Peterson. I know why you're asking. So Jordan Peterson had floated the idea in a tweet of what was he said? He said at least consider Judge Kavanaugh being sworn in to the Supreme Court and then voluntarily quitting to rehabilitate his reputation. This is with the Kavanaugh's reputation and then bring credibility to the Supreme Court. Now people like me and other people questioned that like whoa, how does that work? Because it seems to me the only way this judge can rehabilitate his reputation is by serving and doing a good job in ways in which people will recognize as fair. So he has one path for redemption and he took it, which is getting sworn in, hunkering down, doing the work of the people, you know, and ten years later we're gonna look at his rulings and we're gonna say yeah that was pretty fair. And then you have something like rehabilitation or at least partial. But quitting would certainly look guilty to people and me. That looked like a bad idea.

Now to his credit Jordan Peterson modified, clarified — people would say walked it back. I hate that phrase because sometimes you're just clarifying your thinking. You're not really walking stuff back. That walking it back just has the wrong connotation. So and he explained it in the follow-up tweet that it was more a mental experiment, a thought experiment I guess. And I thought to myself I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. You know, remember my rule, my 48-hour rule? Yeah, somebody just said a year. The 48-hour rule says that if somebody says something that's ambiguous or provocative and people are questioning it, you know, did you really mean to say that, they give the person 48 hours to clarify what they did mean instead of us trying to put our interpretation on it and then judging it at the same time. It's just a bad process. You don't want to put your own interpretation on somebody's ambiguous statement and then blame them for your interpretation because chances are they're gonna clarify.

So he said something that I would say was provocative. It was actually kind of interesting. And that's what a thought experiment does, is it made you think through, okay would that work? How would that work? How would that make people feel? Made you think about a complicated thing. That was good. And then in the end you could see him sort of softening his level of, I don't know, the credibility he was putting in his own thought. And that seemed entirely appropriate because he had thought about it a little more. He got a little more feedback. He clarified. Well we're just, I'm just putting that out there as a thought experiment. To which I say, clarification accepted.

All right, so if you, here's my standard. If you were tempted to say when you saw his first tweet or two on this topic, my God, Jordan Peterson, I thought he was so smart but he seems to have lost it because this latest tweet I totally disagree with, I don't see how this could work. That's not really fair. That's what the 48-hour rule does. It allows the person who's the subject of it, in this case Jordan