Latest / Brett Keane and Eve Show / Interview | Jordan Peterson Explains DOGE Elon Musk Democrat Fear

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Interview | Jordan Peterson Explains DOGE Elon Musk Democrat Fear · Brett Keane and Eve Show

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  I was talking with some people well placed in the
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  administration recently who are convinced that Musk has the
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  possibility of finding like a trillion dollars worth of waste
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  and fraud in the next 4 weeks. Now we should just outline
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  what's happened. Like I've watched the Democrats
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  respond to Musk's group of teenagers, teenage engineers,
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  with contempt. You know, and this is so 1960s,
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  this mode of thinking, because must doesn't have 1520 a hundred
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  teenage engineers. He has, let's say, 20 to 100
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  teenage engineers with the most computing power that the world
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  has ever seen at their fingertips, and they know how to
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  use it. And there are some seriously
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  smart computer engineers. You know, I was just at a lab in
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  Palo Alto that's doing things that are so science fiction,
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  like you can't even imagine it. And, you know, they're inventing
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  revolutionary machines as a byproduct of the revolution in
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  technology that they're pursuing.
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  And these, these, and all this is augmented by AI.
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  And Musk is on top of that. And so he's really, he's really
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  inserted the 21st century into the 19th century in DC.
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  And of course, people don't know what hit them because no one
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  knows what's hitting any of us. And his ability to insert
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  himself into these hidden systems is absolutely
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  revolutionary. You know, it's a mythological
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  trope, an ancient mythological trope that it's the evil brother
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  of the rightful king who is one of the prime enemies of the
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  state. It's the evil brother of the
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  righteous king. And it's the goddess of chaos.
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  Those are the two enemies. It's it's the social structure
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  pathologized or the natural world rebelling, right?
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  So historic enemies. Well, the evil brother of the
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  king is is camouflage and corruption.
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  And what happens as a system develops is that it accretes
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  predators and parasites. That's a biological metaphor.
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  And if the load gets too heavy, the system collapses.
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  And the antidote to that, the Egyptians had figured this out.
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  The ancient Egyptians, the antidote to that was clear,
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  honest speech and careful attention.
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  The God, the Egyptians actually had a God who specified that,
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  signified that that was Horus, and he was the defeater, the
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  eternal enemy of the evil king. And Musk is playing that role
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  with his engineers. He's in there finding out, like,
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  how much of government spending is wasted.
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  Well, you don't know. Why Do you not know?
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  Well, because the government itself doesn't even have the
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  internal mechanisms to track its own behaviour.
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  I'll give you an example of this.
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  So I worked for social services as a consultant in Alberta 40
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  years ago. And oddly enough, I was hired as
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  a junior consultant. I had demonstrated a certain
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  amount of competence in my summer internship and I was
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  hired to duplicate a audit of the social services department
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  that had been commissioned by a major auditing house, I think it
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  was Price Waterhouse. And, and they had charged the
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  government a fortune for that the year before.
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  And the assistant deputy minister asked me to update it,
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  which was a pretty weird request, but I thought, well,
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  what the hell, I'll give it a shot.
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  And so I went through the audit kind of line by line and then
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  called the relevant people who were involved to get a financial
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  update so that it was current. And the first thing I found out
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  was the government had no idea where it was spending its money.
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  And all the, all the numbers were estimates that could have
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  been off by a factor of 10. So, and, and the puncher, the
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  clincher for me was the punchline was that social
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  services literally had no idea what proportion of the money
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  they spent went to the end recipients, So old people,
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  welfare recipients, etcetera, because it's the social safety
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  net branch of the Alberta government.
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  They had no idea. And of course, you know that the
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  typical charity spends 90% of its money running itself.
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  That's if it's well run. And I was reading a book at that
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  time by a man named John Gall. It's a great book.
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  It's a cult classic called Systematics trying to make sense
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  of this. It's a great title, Systematics,
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  very smart. And one of his maxims, his
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  axioms was the name of the system is not what the system
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  does. And so his analytical approach
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  to the analysis of a system was don't assume that anyone knows
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  what it does. That's the first thing you have
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  to find out. Now.
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  That's what Musk is doing. It's called USAID, and that's
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  it's camouflage, you might say. It's like we're out there making
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  the world safe and productive for the desperately poor.
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  Well, no one can oppose that. Well then, But then the
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  questioning starts, which poor people?
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  How much money and how? And the answer to all those
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  questions is something like we don't know or we don't want you
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  to know, right. And then, well, hasn't there
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  also been revelations that the Treasury Department had a policy
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  to not question its invoices? I mean, you couldn't imagine a
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  more insane policy, right? Right.
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  That's it. It.
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  What that means is that if you set up a shell company, what it
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  appears to me is that if you set up a shell company and you sent
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  professional looking invoices to the federal government, that
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  they would pay them without question forever, no matter how
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  much they cost, just so you wouldn't complain.
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  So OK, so Musk is in there. Musk is in there with this
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  incredibly sophisticated technology, rapidly tracking
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  down spending. So the first question is like,
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  what the hell are these agencies actually doing?
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  And it's not like anyone knows. Not not thoroughly.
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  Then the next question, of course, is how much of it is
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  waste? OK, so the management literature
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  indicates management and literature on productivity and
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  creativity. There's two indications from
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  that literature that are germane.
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  The first is that 65% of managers in private companies
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  add negative net value to their companies.
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  Wow. OK, that's a profitable well run
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  private companies, right, 65%, OK.
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  And then you might ask, well, how can a company survive?
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  And the answer to that is the square root of the number of
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  people engaged in a gift in a given domain of, of of effort do
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  half the work. So if you have 10,000 employees,
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  100 of them do half the work. And so that means that Musk
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  didn't do what he did with Twitter, let's say, and fire 85%
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  of the people. And all that happens is profit
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  margins go up and everything runs more efficiently.
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  And so will Elon find a trillion dollars worth of waste in the
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  next 4 weeks? It's like, I guess we'll see.