The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
530. Failure or Success in the Time of Trump | Jim Balsillie
17 Mar 2025
Jordan Peterson sits down with retired co-founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion, known predominantly for the BlackBerry. They discuss how Balsillie helped transition the world into the smartphone age, Canada’s faltering economic performance (well before Trump’s trade war), why America is taking these actions now, and the ideas of Mark Carney (Trudeau on steroids). Mr. Balsillie is the retired chairman and co-CEO of Research in Motion (BlackBerry), a technology company he scaled from an idea to $20 billion in sales globally. His private investment office includes global and domestic technology investments. He is the co-founder of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York and founder of the Council of Canadian Innovators based in Toronto, the Digital Governance Council in Ottawa, and the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, as well as the Centre for Digital Rights, the Balsillie School of International Affairs, the Arctic Research Foundation, and Canadian SHIELD Institute. He currently chairs the boards of CCI, CIGI, Innovation Asset Collective, and Digital Governance Council. He is also a member of the Board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Advisory Board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre; an Honorary Captain (Navy) of the Royal Canadian Navy, and an advisor to Canada School of Public Service. This episode was filmed on March 7th, 2025. | Links | For Jim Balsillie: Read the article "We're All Economic Nationalist's Now" for a better understanding of how the U.S. and Canada trade https://nationalpost.com/opinion/we-are-all-economic-nationalists-now Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
President Trump has proclaimed that my country should become the 51st state.
We have brilliant innovators. We have brilliant researchers. We come up with earth-changing ideas.
What did we do wrong? What did we misunderstand? And what did we fail to apply moving forward?
So the number three AI research center in the world is in Edmonton. Number five is in Toronto. We gave essentially all that away to other US tech companies. I think Trump has made a strategic mistake because America's got an unbelievable deal from Canada.
You know, we actually have the opportunity to make this country roar if we choose wisely. What do you think needs to be done? Hello, everybody. This is a podcast that you might think of as primarily for Canadians, but it's really for anybody who's trying to understand the world economy. where Trump looms large.
It's been a particularly of the last 10 years that Canadian politics has become interesting internationally, not least because the things that are happening everywhere in the West effect everywhere else in the West. And so this is a good case in point.
Now, Canada is in a particularly strange position at the moment because President Trump has, first of all, proclaimed that my country should become the 51st state, and also lambasted us with some very heavy duty economic measures in the form of tariffs. And this has really put the cat among the canaries in Canada. And so the timing of this interview with my guest today could hardly be better.
I'm speaking with Jim Balsley, and Jim was co-CEO of Research in Motion, the inventors of the BlackBerry. And so Jim is responsible, for better or worse, for... transitioning that terrible word, the entire world into the smartphone age. And he was spectacularly successful as a businessman and an innovator and a Canadian businessman and innovator.
But I've known Jim for 15 years and he resigned from BlackBerry a good while ago and he's been equally successful as an entrepreneur and innovator since then, so it wasn't a one-shot wonder, large as that wonder was. Jim is one of the most reliable and good-natured and yet incisive and critically-minded thinkers that I've met, very well-connected, very competent.
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