Ep. 65: "Trumpet Discrimination"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: It's early.
Merlin: It's early.
Merlin: It's early.
Merlin: My daughter's got a persistent cough.
Merlin: Yeah, it's going around.
Merlin: Everybody's got it.
Merlin: Yeah, it's gotten productive, which is hard when you're a kid.
John: Yeah, that's bad.
John: Yeah.
John: Is she taking an expectorant?
Merlin: Not as much as I'd like.
Merlin: I am totally fine with drugging our daughter up and my wife is kind of a prude about it.
John: Oh, I see.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But there's a lot going around.
Merlin: She goes to school and everything's going around.
John: Kids are hotbeds of sick.
Merlin: I like little sponges.
Merlin: I throw out my sponges all the time.
John: They're disgusting.
John: Scott Simpson bought me some, what he considered some kind of magic Japanese sponge.
Merlin: He buys this for everybody.
Merlin: You went to that one store.
John: Yeah.
John: And I, and it was, it's great, except here's the thing.
John: It's a white sponge.
John: Yeah.
John: Now, if you're going to, if you're going to make a sponge a color,
John: Don't make it white.
John: No.
John: That's a terrible color.
John: The first time I used it, then it looked like I used it on something that was dirty.
John: And then I had like a permanently dirty sponge.
Merlin: And you got to live with that.
John: I got to live with that.
John: Every time I go to the sink, I turn the water and I look down and here's this sponge that's like spoiled.
Merlin: Well, and you know, a lot of it's breeding.
Merlin: I think like we're, we're not from wealthy families and you know, certain kinds of things in the home, you use them until they're not usable anymore.
Merlin: That's my background.
John: Yeah.
John: But Scott Simpson, you're saying when they use the sponge once and then they threw it out the window and the gardener took it away.
Merlin: I think that's where he is now.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: As you know, he's extremely rich from making texts.
Merlin: He is rich.
Merlin: But I think he's from a very modest background too, with one exception.
Merlin: I don't know if he ever told you this.
Merlin: You know, his mom had a band.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And they had uniforms.
Merlin: Like a Navy marching band?
Merlin: I don't think so.
Merlin: I think it was a rock band.
Merlin: They played.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And they, they played out, you know, that kind of playing out where you play at your friends events.
Merlin: And I'm guessing they probably would just assume you just brought ice.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so, so he was in an amazing situation that I would have killed for, which is he could just walk downstairs with his pals and there was a hole in their basement.
Merlin: There was like a whole setup where you could just walk down there and like play instruments.
Yeah.
John: Well, now here, this brings me to an interesting internal dilemma that I have, which is that I went to a pop music conference last weekend where I was the keynote speaker.
Merlin: Wow.
John: And it took place in Bellingham, Washington.
John: I like where this is going.
John: And so I prepared this speech.
John: blah blah blah speech but i got to the pop conference early in contravention of my normal method of showing up to an event one second before i take the stage that's better for security reasons if nothing else i went i went instead and i attended this you think malcolm x hung out in the green room for five hours no no he did not no he walked in and that was the beginning he sat in the back where he could see the door
John: So I go to this thing and I go to all these panels and it's happening in Bellingham, Washington.
John: And I assure to you, I assure you rather, I do not assure to you.
John: It's early.
John: Every one of these panels is blowing my mind.
John: And it's blowing my mind primarily because they're talking about pop music and pop music business.
John: But there is an element of like...
John: The expectation of the panelists was that they would address some issue.
John: They would address the issue of social justice.
John: They would address the issue of community building and inclusiveness.
John: as they were answering questions about how do I get my band signed and how do I, uh, you know, like how do I promote my record via social media, but how do I, but also how do I, uh, further the cause of social justice and increase diversity in pop bands or in, in like the music scene in general.
John: And, and there was, and there was a predictable amount of like sort of like mild college people
John: like bubbling hostility that goes along with both the askers and the answerers of questions like that.
John: And the whole, you know, the whole day, the premise was like, um, yeah, hi.
John: Um, I'm just wondering why are there not more Inupia rock bands?
John: Has anybody really thought about that?
John: And like, maybe we should all look at our, our playlists and see like, uh,
John: That, like, we don't have any Inupiat bands, and is that a problem?
John: I don't know.
John: I'm not sure what my question is.
John: And the person that's on the panel is, like, someone who works in the music business, and they're like, uh, uh, I don't, uh, you know, like, absolutely flabbergasted at how to try and answer that question.
Merlin: Well, can I ask a question?
Merlin: Were you aware and were the other panelists aware that social justice would be a focus of the Bellingham Pop Conference?
Merlin: Or how prepared were you in your remarks, for example?
John: Yeah, well, my remarks had no element of social justice consideration in them.
John: hate crime hate crime i was up there i was getting ready to give a keynote speech at this conference that was basically a hate crime and so on the fly i threw my notes in the garbage can and i should have recycled it i did in fact i did in fact recycle it and you know and truth be told i was using merlin man three by five cards which i never used to do but i do it now an homage to you thank you
John: So by the time I got to my... By the time we arrived at my keynote speech, I had been to 10 panels.
John: And every one of them had this kind of like, we need to search our souls to see how we can make it easier for everybody in the world to become a rock star.
John: And by that, we don't mean like...
John: How to make it easier in the world for everybody to be a rock star.
John: And then also, by the way, how do I get my band on the radio?
Merlin: And so I got up at the... That seems, I mean, just to be honest, I mean, being a rock star seems pretty phallocentric and patriarchal.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: I mean, shouldn't we all be equal in rock?
John: I could not speak to that.
John: And part of it was just that, like, being a rock star, really?
John: I mean...
John: That's really still a thing that we do.
John: Can you even tune your guitar at this point?
John: But I wanted to address it because there were actually some very thoughtful panelists.
John: And in general, you know, I feel like that dialogue of like, hi, yeah, I just feel like people with allergies should be allowed to play Coachella, but there's a lot of dust in the air.
John: So how do we make Coachella accessible to people with allergies?
John: Like, I feel like that kind of question...
John: is is almost reflexive in like students now where they're not invested in in the question they are sitting in they're sitting in a lecture hall and they're thinking how can I like how do I phrase a question that is going to be a that's going to be kind of a mic drop like
John: Nobody thought of that.
John: Like, I found an underrepresented group of people that nobody thought of, and now you're all wishing that you had thought of people with allergies at Coachella.
Merlin: It becomes a way of speaking truth to power, even when there's not that much power there, and probably a fairly scant amount of truth.
John: Yeah, and it has become a scenario where people are not actually seeking equality anymore for anybody.
John: It's just a game of like, I have exposed equality.
John: the inequality and so gold star for me i asked a question and now i can go back to to facebooking and the professor the professor in every case is forced by by the by the energy or by the by the convention that he has to he or she has to consider that question legitimately you know what i mean like the professor the professor is not in a position to say you know what that's a that's an
John: Rather, the answer which is ultimately true, which is it is impossible to make the world completely accessible to everyone.
John: It is simply impossible.
John: And so every question phrased within the umbrella of our endgame is to make everything absolutely impossible.
John: even and fair is, is the same question basically.
John: And it doesn't matter whether you are saying Inupiates or people with allergies or people with social anxiety disorder.
John: It is the same question over and over, which is how do we make the world completely fair?
John: And we cannot.
John: So what we can do is aspire in certain places, but it isn't, but the game is not to just keep, keep finding a smaller and smaller aperture, you know?
John: Anyway, so I get up at the pop conference and I say, the reality about making art is that...
John: The best art is made in reaction to restriction or limitation.
John: The culture in Prague in the 70s and 60s produced a whole generation of playwrights and artists that were working in reaction to the regime.
John: And as soon as the regime fell...
John: All of that art, I mean, name a Czech playwright now.
John: You can't, really, because who knows?
John: There's one, and I think he passed.
John: Well, there was that one that became the president of the country.
John: That is the role that art played that came up in a repressive regime.
John: Now there are probably one million Czech playwrights and none of them stand out.
John: And the reality is we have made making pop music incredibly easy.
John: There is no difficulty at all.
John: Anyone of any age or gender can do as much pop music as they want.
John: But it has not...
John: proved the quality of pop music, if you know what I mean.
John: Like, there are a million bands now, and none of them are good, because having a barrier to entry, having it be difficult, is what makes people make good art.
John: They make good art almost exactly because they are experiencing the challenge of being forced to make art as their primary voice.
Merlin: Well, I mean, it's like making a diamond.
Merlin: You don't make a diamond by spreading out the soil and bringing it iced tea.
Merlin: And there has to be a certain – for that passion to come out, there has to be – yeah, maybe there's a reaction.
Merlin: Maybe there's influences.
Merlin: But there has to be some kind of a crucible, I think, in most cases.
Merlin: But the whole thing is so misdirected.
Merlin: I don't even know where to begin.
Merlin: So you're going to create social justice by coming in and talking about pop music in a room.
Merlin: I can't even, I can't even begin to address that.
Merlin: But, but, but the other thing is like, are they, are they people in Bellingham?
Merlin: I mean, so I'm guessing it was an extremely diverse audience of people who had the time to come in and go to a pop music conference about social justice.
Merlin: I bet it was extraordinarily diverse.
John: There was the, there was the white kid that was making hip hop.
John: There was the white kid that was making, I don't know.
John: There was a, there was a half Asian guy, but he was on a panel and,
John: Anyway, the point of all that was I have been wrestling since the time my daughter was born with the fact that I have a house full of instruments.
John: And when I was growing up,
John: I bought my first guitar from my sister's friend who bought it at a swap meet.
John: My sister and her friend were going to start an all-girl Duran Duran cover band.
John: And my sister bought a keyboard, and her friend Tracy bought a guitar, and they set up in the basement...
John: And they put their fedoras on and their scarves and their pirate shirts.
John: And they put on Rio and plugged in their keyboard and their guitar and went black, black, black, black, black, black, black.
John: And they realized that they couldn't play these instruments and didn't have a real interest in learning an instrument.
John: They just wanted to be in a Duran Duran cover band.
John: And so they stacked the instruments in the corner.
John: where they sat gathering dust and I walked past him every day and looked at him.
John: And at a, about a month later, I, I said to the two girls, I was like, Hey, um, you guys gonna, gonna do anything with those?
John: And Tracy sold me her guitar for 25 bucks.
John: And my sister, of course, out of spite said, don't touch my keyboard.
Um,
John: And it sat in the corner.
John: She went off to ski.
John: Sat in the corner.
John: She never touched it.
John: I never touched it.
John: It had an inch of dust on it eventually.
John: And then at one point she owed me some money.
John: And I was like, I'll take that keyboard.
John: And she was happy to have it gone.
John: So I ended up with all the Duran Duran cover band instruments.
Merlin: I don't want to derail you from the daughter thing because I'd love to talk about that.
Merlin: But there's this other part of this that obsesses me in the things that I think about, which is on the one hand sort of trying to solve the wrong problem and how the best thing that you can do for somebody if you've had experience, similar experience, is to help them understand that as noble or as theoretically interesting as your goals are, if you're trying to solve the wrong problem, you're going to be perma-screwed.
Merlin: Because – and then you can just dig in further and get deeper and deeper and matter and matter and demonstrate more and more.
John: But a theme – I think our entire culture is trying to solve the wrong problem now.
Merlin: Well, they sure are.
Merlin: There's like three problems with this.
Merlin: And then the second one is that –
Merlin: Carpenters who make a lot of furniture don't go to conferences and ask about social justice and carpentry.
Merlin: They go out and they build lots of stuff and then they try to be decent human beings.
Merlin: And they understand that those are pretty different things.
Merlin: If you don't get your hands around it, you're never going to solve the right problem.
John: Well, I was persuaded – there was one panelist who said something very interesting because I am –
John: We constantly hear about institutionalized inequality, and for people that are our age, we've been hearing about it our whole adult lives.
John: I mean, this was a concept that was introduced to us first during the Civil Rights Movement, where...
John: We had to be educated to the fact that just because now blacks had the right to vote did not necessarily mean that they had equal opportunity in the country.
John: And it was a process of education of people who had never experienced deprivation that they had to learn like, oh, I see what you mean.
John: If you grow up in a place where there is...
John: you know where it where racism is institutionalized even if on the surface of things everybody has the same rights you really are having a very different experience of living in america and it is a tremendous it does present a tremendous disadvantage right so that was a process of education that happened a
John: in america over the course of our our whole lives it's been happening and as time has gone on that franchise of disenfranchisement has been extended so then it was then you mean like like how you can take the um the vocabulary and the sensibilities of of really deeply systematically oppressed peoples and then apply it to people with bikes
John: Right, but when the women's rights movement happened, it was a similar process of like, oh, wait a minute, you mean even well-to-do women who live comfortable lives in the city are also disenfranchised?
John: Wow, that's a new mental technology.
Merlin: I never would have thought of that, right?
John: Yeah, and it took years to sink in.
John: And again, that happened throughout the course of our lives, and
John: So then, yeah, then the franchise kept getting extended until now.
John: It's like people with allergies, people with myopia, people with social anxiety disorder, people with whatever.
John: And they are making themselves equivalent to...
John: to people who have, who actually struggle.
John: Well, you know, who hates that is people who have actually struggled.
John: Well, and also me, I hate it too, but, but there's a tendency, I think there's a tendency among, among everybody.
John: And in particular, uh, dare I say it among those of us who, uh,
John: who are constantly reminded that we benefit from the structure which is to say white men we benefit from the from the inequality and we benefit from it unconsciously and there there is a tendency on our part to say oh my god we've been hearing about this our whole lives can we can we stop fighting the same battle
John: But I had a very interesting, or I heard an interesting thing on one of the panels, which was a thoughtful woman who said, you know, when I was in fourth grade and I joined band, I wanted to play the trumpet.
John: And I was...
John: guided by the hand over to the clarinets and flutes yeah and as she said it i was like well of course of course you were the clarinet and the flute is a girl's instrument and the trumpet is a boy's instrument and it it was a it was the most resonant uh example of
John: of this kind of like ingrained, institutionalized, gender role-based inequality that I had heard in years, you know, because you're so used to being polemicized about it and people's talking about, like a friend of mine came home and said, you know, quoted the oft-quoted statistic, like women are paid 72 cents on the dollar.
John: And I said, is that true at your office?
John: Do you feel like you were paid 72 cents to the dollar that your comparably educated and talented co-workers paid?
John: And she said, what?
John: No, of course not.
John: And I said, does anyone you know work in an environment where that is the case?
John: And she said, no.
John: And I said, so what is, I mean, I understand the statistic, but when you say it,
John: When you say it, when you come home and say, like, women are paid 72 cents on the dollar, it is a, you say it with a considerable amount of peak.
John: You are angry about it.
John: But it isn't something that you or anybody you know is personally experiencing.
John: So who are those people who are being paid 72 cents on the dollar?
John: If you guys, if you are making the equivalent of your male counterparts, that means in order for that statistic to be true, there must be women somewhere in America who are being paid 30 cents on the dollar.
Right.
John: And I wonder if there are two people working the same job and one of them is because of her gender really being paid that much.
John: Or if it's a statistic that has been massaged and repeated so many times that we take it as given without examining it.
John: I don't know where...
John: Suffice to say that I walked away from this experience both kind of newly curious about this trumpet flute.
John: Trumpet discrimination.
John: The trumpet discrimination.
John: And also my feeling was reinforced that...
John: that no one is really talking about, like, what is the long-term plan for this movement that has become an institution now?
John: It is a revolutionary movement to extend equal rights to all that is a Marxist argument, ultimately, to each according to his need, from each according to his ability...
John: And we are very happy to fight little tiny battles about it all day, every day.
John: My Twitter feed is full of people saying, well, there's another example of a war on women.
John: And then I click through the link and it's like something that just is just an interesting news article, not particularly an example of a war on women.
Merlin: But I mean there's just two parts to this that drive me a little bananas.
Merlin: I mean the meta part is I really resent being saddled with the idea that like because I think it's silly –
Merlin: To live inside of these abstractions, I don't think that these are important things.
Merlin: I think they're important enough.
Merlin: If you want to fucking raise, why don't you go ask for one?
Merlin: Because, yeah, we can point to a million statistics about other people.
Merlin: We can even point to statistics about ourselves.
Merlin: But, you know, on the one hand, I understand why you would want to adopt that attitude because it can be very powerful and can help bring people together.
Merlin: But the second part is it always – it so frequently seems to be about –
Merlin: Like legislating a change of heart in people that aren't you.
Merlin: It seems to be all about like, well, let's sit around in this room and set an agenda for how we can make other people better.
John: Legislating a change of heart in someone who's not you.
John: That is a perfect description of it.
Merlin: Well, if you want social justice, why don't you get off your ass?
Merlin: Why don't you stop treating it as a problem that needs to be solved by a panel of people in pop music?
Merlin: And why don't you go out and do something?
Merlin: And if you want the raise, ask for it.
Merlin: If you want to still hang your head and talk about how –
Merlin: oppressed you are, that's certainly something you're, you're free to do.
Merlin: But you know, we've come a long way from the 1960s.
Merlin: If you go and you, if you, if you feel like you're getting 72 cents on the dollar, ask for a fucking raise.
Merlin: That's your, that's who you are.
Merlin: If you want to be, go empower yourself, you know, get out there and do it.
Merlin: And if you can find a way to bring social justice and pop music, why don't you leave the fucking conference and go out there and do it?
Merlin: Get your hands around the problem, learn which parts of it you can do something about and quit worrying about how to change the rest of the world.
Merlin: Because it doesn't work.
John: Yeah.
John: I think that is ultimately the thing that that is the string that resonates most deeply.
Merlin: Because if enough women do that, then it's not going to be a problem anymore.
John: Well, ultimately, all these questions are questions that are resolved when you raise your kids right.
John: And when you raise your kids to think differently and behave differently in the world.
John: And
John: It really is a thing where you change your own heart.
John: You evangelize yourself.
John: You are the primary mission field.
John: And then your family.
John: And really...
John: I had a very interesting exchange a few years ago on Twitter where I asked somebody, I kind of asked the group this exact question, like, can you, through application of law, really change the hearts and minds of a people?
John: Or are you...
John: I mean, I think in America we see a lot of the division that we have now, like the clear division between the two halves of our nation.
John: A lot of it is the product of trying to use...
John: prescriptive law to change the hearts and minds of half the population what a legacy of efficacy we have for that yeah so we keep saying i mean the abortion rights issue is a thing that we have been we've been fighting this battle a bloody cultural battle that takes up all of our you know it takes up the whole center of our national dialogue
John: And the reality is that Roe versus Wade was a badly decided piece of law.
John: And that's why it's constantly under assault.
John: Because they think they can beat it.
John: They think it's bad law and they think they have a shot.
Merlin: You're talking about the anti-abortion people.
John: Yeah, the anti-abortion people think they can beat it because it is bad law.
John: And it's just a matter of time before the right...
John: combination of supreme court justices decide to look at it you know in the narrow confines of the of the legal decision and overturn it not be not on a moral basis but overturn it because it's you know because it was kind of a shitty piece of legal thinking
John: But the reality, I think, is that if Roe v. Wade was overturned, there would be an immediate and mad rush to write new law in its place that was better.
John: I mean, the best thing that could happen to the abortion rights movement is that Roe v. Wade be overturned because the next piece of law would be ironclad.
John: I mean, I feel like the arc of social justice is long, or the arc of history is long, but it points towards social justice.
John: I think that's absolutely true.
John: I think that it is inevitable that we are becoming more liberal and more inclusive and more...
John: accessible to everyone right but but we keep trying to we keep trying to use the the the lever of law to bring all these people that are that are you know that really all we can do is kind of wait for them to die and wait for their kids wait for their kids to
John: Approved gay marriage, you know, that we could have made gay marriage legal by force of law 25 years ago, and it would have it would have sparked an armed insurrection in the South.
John: But we suffered those 20 years.
John: And now it's happening.
John: And it's happening not because the law forced people and not because we really changed anybody's minds, but just because the young people came up and they liked MTV and they watched Sheena, Queen of the Desert.
John: And they're like, oh, yeah, that seems reasonable.
John: And just attitudes changed.
John: And this is the, you know, I remember...
John: being very persuaded by Malcolm X and by Martin Luther King when they said, you know, all we're ever told by Whitey is that we need to wait.
John: It's not time yet.
John: We need to wait.
John: And we're done waiting.
John: We're tired of waiting.
John: And the time is now.
John: And that was very persuasive, and it produced...
John: It produced real action and real motion that hadn't, you know, where culturally we were stalled in this weird separate but equal miasma.
John: But that mentality, like, when you say, well, you know, after 50,000 years, like, maybe give it another 10,000.
John: When you say that now, when you're talking about sort of any kind of sea change in the culture, you say that to a group of people, and they're so quick to say, like, that's what every white man says.
Merlin: Wait!
Merlin: Well, think about going back to asking for a raise just as a practical example.
Merlin: Obviously, it's more related to your own merits.
Merlin: But if you've ever had a job, you know that there's some really good times to ask for a raise and some terrible times to ask for the raise.
Merlin: And if you really do want to raise – I realize this is not completely related.
Merlin: But if you want to get a raise and it means a lot to you, you have to prepare for that.
Merlin: You have to have – you have to know all of the facts and –
Merlin: And understand them in context with reality.
Merlin: And the truth is there are better and worse times to ask for a raise.
Merlin: But if you are prepared, when that time does come, you're going to have a much better chance.
Merlin: Whether or not – no matter how much you want it, it doesn't matter.
Merlin: What matters is whether you're prepared and then in context can ask it at the right time where somebody goes, well, of course I'll give you a raise.
Merlin: I'm not stupid.
Merlin: But the fact just doesn't – it can matter how much you want it, and certainly there have been things that changed.
Merlin: But I'm with you, and there's two times that I feel a little bit peaked from, again, things like Twitter, but also just the whole world, like obviously doing sports events.
Merlin: But the other thing is during elections because every election –
Merlin: or anytime there's some kind of political tumult going on, everybody's picked their side, you see, at least in my Twitter feed or amongst my friends, I see everybody locking arms to make fun of the other side, to browbeat them, to call them stupid, and to talk about all the ways that they're wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Merlin: And this is maybe really reductive, but this is how I look at it.
Merlin: I will ask you exactly one question.
Merlin: When is the last time that somebody calling you stupid and saying how little you knew changed your mind?
Merlin: Because people can sit around all day long and make fun of Fox TV and shoot fish in a conservative barrel.
Merlin: But honestly, if you're so goddamn smart, when is the last time that you sat and watched Fox News and heard about how stupid you are and you went, you know what?
Merlin: I am kind of stupid.
Merlin: I don't think people do that.
Merlin: I don't think it's effective.
Merlin: And all it does – I mean on a larger scale, obviously, it just makes us more –
Merlin: You know, we start to see the other side as inhuman.
Merlin: And as soon as you see that quote unquote other side to begin with, well, I mean, you know, we're all kind of in the same pot.
Merlin: And the more we try and find some kind of a common ground, and certainly that's what politicians do, the better off we are.
Merlin: But all I'm trying to say is like, you know, in addition to this being an incredibly complex problem with a million different angles, I don't think you change hearts and minds through either legislation or by making fun of people.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And you can sit around a room all day long and come up with some kind of bill of rights for people who play mandolins, but I'm not sure that's going to make black people any better off when it comes time to go to Bonnaroo.
John: Whoa.
John: There's a lot to unpack in that last sentence.
Merlin: I'm angry.
Merlin: There's a thing on the California public radio thing today that really got me thinking.
Merlin: I think it's related.
Merlin: And it has to do with the aging population.
Merlin: The oldest of...
Merlin: The oldest of baby boomers turned – I guess the youngest of baby boomers turned like 65 this year.
Merlin: The point being that there are fewer and fewer – there are more and more people who are going to need benefits or want benefits that they have coming to them and fewer and fewer people that are going to be able to supply it.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And you know what compounds that hugely is that due to things like bad economies and things like legislation, we don't have enough immigrants coming here anymore.
Merlin: And we don't have enough illegal immigrants coming here anymore.
Merlin: And so all of a sudden, everything that we did to keep immigrants from coming here through legislation and so forth is now harming California.
Merlin: Because in addition to having a lot less people to sit there in the sun and pick lettuce that no white person wants to pick, now we also have this bigger problem of we're not going to be able to pay for all of these things.
Merlin: So, I mean, to me, there's unintended consequences to all these sorts of things, but it really comes down to getting off your ass, get off Twitter and go do something about it.
Merlin: If it matters to you, why don't you do something about it?
Merlin: You know, Martin Luther King did not sit around typing in 140 characters and tried to change the world.
Merlin: It's just, you know, you're not invested in that.
Merlin: You're invested until the next, the change of the color of your icon.
Merlin: I'm getting angry now.
John: And you get all pissed off until the next thing comes along.
John: I'm less worried about the chattering classes on Twitter.
Merlin: But they think they're helping, John.
Merlin: They think they're contributing to the body politic.
John: But I don't care about them.
John: The real difference that's happening among people who really are off their asses and doing things is that the fundamental liberal project...
John: has been since the 50s, but really since the 60s, to imagine that we are creating a utopia in America, and there are a lot of people who don't want it or don't get it,
John: And we're going to help them along by forcing them to open their minds.
Merlin: We'll try education.
Merlin: You know, we'll try educating them.
Merlin: But if it doesn't work, we got a big hammer here.
John: Yeah.
John: And and through through a lot of like great society style.
John: Like sort of big projects like busing and housing projects and.
John: a legislative approach and a social engineering approach, liberalism set about to create a utopia by dragging people along, kicking and screaming.
John: And not everybody, of course, but dragging the recalcitrant people along.
John: The stragglers.
John: And, you know, there was a moment...
John: Sometime in the 70s, and I sensed this moment where crackpot conservatism became mainstream, there was just this overflow point right around the time that governments were saying, well, you can no longer have an all-male conservative.
John: smoking club like you and your buddies started this club you sit around smoking cigars but it is discriminatory that you're that you have a requirement that it be all dudes so you have to open the doors and at the at the moment where we we reached down into the culture and started saying
John: In general, you can no longer be just some dudes in a club.
John: It's against the law now.
John: That was the personal moment, I think, where conservatism became the ascendant movement.
John: Because there are just a lot of people in the world who instinctively...
John: Do not want to be told.
John: who they can hang out with.
John: And it isn't a... Their response wasn't coming from a place of racism or sexism.
John: It was coming from a deeply personal place where suddenly somebody with a clipboard, somebody like that EPA agent in Ghostbusters... That guy.
John: An officious government employee with a clipboard was saying, Venkman, shut it down!
Merlin: And people... Just like the people who tell the farmers they can't build skyscrapers, right?
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: Remember your thing about land rights and the whole idea?
John: Exactly.
John: And the thing about the land rights...
John: question is, it is persuasive to me because we are all using the same water and the same sewage.
John: And likewise, the men's club argument is persuasive in the sense that we are all using the same water and the same sewage.
John: But this was the moment where people who already felt like
John: This liberal project was pushing them against their will, with their heels dug in, pushing them toward a world that they couldn't see and didn't understand.
John: And then it got personal.
John: It came down to their streets.
John: Exactly.
John: Where it was like, wait a minute, now I can't even...
Merlin: Now I can't even hire my brother-in-law because... Yeah, it's one thing for California to come up with a bunch of fruity stuff or Vermont or whatever, but now you really are literally in my backyard.
John: You're down here telling me how to do my business.
John: And from up high, liberalism said, well, this is how it has to happen.
John: We have to go around...
John: Like that scene in Dr. Zhivago, where all of a sudden, post-revolution, Dr. Zhivago and his family, who used to live in a 30-room mansion, are now... There's a knock on the door, and there's a woman with a clipboard, and she is moving other...
John: She's moving families into their home and increasingly the Zhivago's are now they're just living on one floor of their home and pretty soon the whole family is living in one room curtained off with sheets.
John: Sounds a lot like Warsaw.
Yeah.
John: No, right?
John: Yeah, well, that's exactly right.
John: And the premise is, like, how could you Zhivagos have been living in such luxury while people were poor on the street?
John: You know, people were dying in the cold.
John: And now everybody is living together together.
John: in a rat's warren, in your old family mansion, congratulations.
John: Now, you know, we have arrived at a, at, at yeah, Marxist equality, which is squalor for squalor for all.
John: But, but that, you know, feeling, trying to feel sympathy, it's very hard now to hear somebody from Arkansas or somebody even from Seattle saying,
John: who has a large Dodge truck that maybe has...
John: Some truck nuts hanging from the back bumper.
John: Those are illegal in California now.
John: They are.
John: Listening to them bitch and moan with a ton of vitriol about how Obama is coming to force them to accept medical insurance.
John: It's very hard for liberal sensibility to not feel like, what is the matter with you crybabies?
John: My God.
John: Like, man up.
John: But the fact is that they're expressing a discontent that's 40 years old that is really a discontent with the premise of the whole liberal project, which is that we are headed toward a utopia and you are coming whether you like it or not.
Merlin: And there's something that's kind of authentic about that.
Merlin: Whether I agree with it or not, there's this basic thing.
Merlin: I've said this before, but I really believe there aren't that many people who think they're stupid.
Merlin: I think most people think other people are stupid.
Merlin: Very few people say, you know what?
Merlin: I'm really stupid and need people to massage my understanding of the world in such a way that I can be a good citizen.
John: Well, the key thing about being ignorant is that you are first primarily ignorant of how stupid you are.
Merlin: Well, that's the difference between – to me, the difference between stupidity and ignorance is ignorance can be cured if you –
Merlin: But you're on to something, I think, which is that people – and this is – I might be shooting fish in a liberal barrel here.
Merlin: I might be going to the Whole Foods barrel.
Merlin: But it's funny to me – It's an olive barrel.
Merlin: Oh, sorry.
Merlin: It's artisanal.
Merlin: It's amazing to me like how many people –
Merlin: You live in Pack Heights.
Merlin: You live in Berkeley.
Merlin: And you're very, very comfortable in your surroundings by and large.
Merlin: And you're more than happy to institute busing.
Merlin: You're more than happy to institute whatever, public housing.
Merlin: Well, you know what?
Merlin: Can we have your house for public housing?
Merlin: Can we bus your kid across town?
Merlin: Is that cool with you?
Merlin: Are you really super into that?
Merlin: And some people are.
Merlin: I have really good friends here in town that moved here, and it's frustrating.
Merlin: They moved here specifically to be part of the great San Francisco experiment.
Merlin: They used public transit.
Merlin: They have their kid go to the school that gets assigned to them.
Merlin: And that's – it's difficult sometimes, but their values around that are to me much more authentic than people who are going in and –
Merlin: AstroTurfing polls on CNN to make sure the right side wins.
Merlin: Because I don't think – I've said – again, I don't think you care about something until you've sacrificed for it.
Merlin: And if you care that much about all that stuff, like why don't you put your money where your mouth is or put your life where your mouth is because it's –
Merlin: if you agree, if you just stipulate for one week that you're stupid and you need other people to tell you what to do, your eyes open to how the world operates and that you see that there's much more to this persuasion of utopian or otherwise of trying to get somewhere better than from telling people that they're stupid and need to be hammered into complicity or into, you know, submission.
John: I just wish that, you know, liberalism is very self-reflective in some ways, narrow corridors.
Um,
John: But there is not a historic self-reflection that applies to what we've been doing since World War II.
John: And if we were able as a culture to look back and say we tore down all of the tenement buildings on the Lower East Side and we built massive brick housing projects and we did it
John: because we were solving all these problems, hygiene problems.
John: We were solving the incredible mess, the unruly mess of downtown New York that was full of immigrants, and everybody was just wading through sewage, and there was a watch shop next to a hat shop.
John: How can this stand?
John: We're going to bulldoze it.
John: We're going to bulldoze block after block, and we're going to build these neat and tidy housing projects, this giant government undertaking, and we're going to provide a clean and secure neighborhood environment for people, and it's going to uplift the people.
Merlin: But we can social engineer that by design.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And to look at that now...
John: you see like, Oh my God, what a misguided approach.
John: Like the Cabrini green projects in Chicago became the most dangerous place in the universe.
John: A place where the police, I was driving through Chicago one time in the, in the mid eighties.
John: And I was advised by a policeman not to stop at red lights.
Yeah.
John: And I said, message received.
John: Like he said, just don't... Through this part of the city, I would not wait for the light to change.
Merlin: You know, we had this neat idea that we would find a way to take all of the desperate people with nothing to lose and then stack them up like cordwood.
John: Well, and in a place where we did not have... We had the mandate to tear down the old neighborhood and build this, but we did not have the mandate to fund it...
John: Right.
John: And we did not have the mandate to, to, to follow through on that, which is you, that you don't just, you don't just tear down people's neighborhoods and put them in high rises and then automatically they have become philosopher scholars.
John: Like you then also have to have the money to make those schools in that neighborhood, the best schools there are and have job training programs.
John: And the, and it does not work if you,
John: If you are also experiencing a nationwide decline in manufacturing and you can't do that and then also close all the factories.
John: But we are – it is very hard for us to look back at that and say that was a liberal project.
John: With the end goal of creating a utopia, and what it created was a blight.
John: And it created, in a lot of ways, it precipitated the death of the inner city that took... We're still trying to recover from.
John: We're still trying to recover from.
John: That's right.
John: And, you know, the story of Detroit...
John: is that when they were building the interstate highway system, they slammed the interstate right through the heart of Detroit's most vibrant black neighborhood.
John: And they just cut it in half and killed it in one fell swoop.
John: And it produced so much anger in the city of Detroit in what was at the time a very vibrant and alive black community of music and art.
John: That, you know, Detroit went through 40 years where it was recreational to go burn down abandoned houses.
John: Like, that was something that people did on weekends.
John: Like, let's go burn some houses.
John: Because they had completely lost...
John: They're feeling that the city belonged to them.
John: And I'm talking about everybody in Detroit, you know, because of this, what was, what was eventually, or what was ultimately, I mean, I'm not saying the interstates were, were just a liberal project.
John: They were an Eisenhowerian.
John: But they would also support industry.
Merlin: It would make, make it easier for people in the suburbs to get to their jobs.
Merlin: Oh yeah.
John: It was a, it was a big, it was a big social engineering concept.
John: Like, here's what we're going to do now.
John: Instead of being stuck in traffic all day, wending your way into this little neighborhood where the hat shop is next to the watch shop, we're going to just tear it all down and we're going to build a big spaceport out of brick.
Merlin: These guys need some modernity.
Merlin: They really do.
John: We need to bring some brutalism in here and it is going to improve the quality of everybody's life.
John: Yeah.
John: 50 years from now, everybody is going to be dancing like in those Buck Rogers television shows in the early 80s where people are holding on to... They're holding on to... They're like pleasure balls or something.
John: Yeah, they're holding on to ribbons and pleasure balls and they're dancing around to Brian Edo music.
John: And that's going to be the future if we just get rid of all this... If we just get rid of the center of the city where people are living as people naturally do...
John: which is, frankly, like mud pigs.
John: But that's who we are, you know?
John: So I wish that liberalism had the capacity as a forward-thinking system
John: uh like ideology to do a little bit of backward looking and say we have we have tried to engineer a utopia multiple times where education and government action
John: Enlightened the people and and once it was patiently explained to them that equal rights for all was was beneficial and economically like advantageous.
John: Everybody got it.
John: And then we were living in a future world where all the children are mocha china colored.
John: And we sit around on the steps of our pantheon and read estulous plays to one another.
John: And that is the America that we hope for and inspire to.
John: And frankly, a lot of things we've tried have worked great.
John: But the resentment that you feel in America about big government telling you what to do is that there are people that really were... And what's amazing is that the people that were most affected by the liberal big government projects...
John: They are still Democrats.
John: It's the people that were kind of on the outside looking in and going, you know, the people that got out to the suburbs that looked back at the city and said, you know, liberalism is bankrupt.
John: And when I think about it that way, I still have a very hard time being yelled at by conservatives.
John: But I do sympathize with their...
John: With some of the evidence that they're able to muster that like this mentality, which is we are coming into your homes and we're going to explain to you why you're wrong.
John: And then we're going to deprive you of what you consider to be your rights.
Mm-hmm.
John: And it's in service of the greater good.
John: And you're going to like it or not.
John: Doesn't matter.
John: Go fuck yourself.
John: Oh, also God is dead.
John: Woo!
John: Free pot for everybody.
John: I see why they're bent out of shape.
Merlin: I totally do.
Merlin: I want to get back to your keynote in a minute if we can.
Merlin: But it reminds me, I think as somebody from the North in the literal and figurative sense, I don't think I really understood a lot about the Civil War until I met my friend Richard and read some Faulkner.
Merlin: And I got a really different point of view into it.
Merlin: And I started to really – what's that?
John: Well, yeah, because we think in the North we are taught that everybody in the South is like Bo and Luke Duke.
Merlin: Well, right.
Merlin: And I mean my understanding of it is that part of what made things so complicated in the –
Merlin: beginning to middle part of the 19th century, was that slavery – it would be glib to call it a MacGuffin, but it's certainly worth mentioning that it wasn't just slavery.
Merlin: It was a matter of telling us how to live.
Merlin: Whether you like or don't like slavery, it ends up being germane.
Merlin: But the deeper issue is we didn't –
Merlin: I guess it seems like the North maybe – I don't know.
Merlin: I'm not a historian.
Merlin: But it seems to me that they – the North didn't fully accept the extent to which people in Virginia were going to be put off by us telling these, as you say, these people from Scotland who are really used to autonomy and they've got their own mature culture.
Merlin: We may not like their mature culture.
Merlin: They're doing what I would personally consider awful, awful things.
Merlin: But at the same time, we're going down there and like we're really poking the bull in the eye by not acknowledging what we were facing from people who thought that their culture was fine just the way it is, thank you very much.
Merlin: And we make it about slavery because it should be about slavery.
Merlin: I'm sure glad it's gone.
Merlin: But at the same time, one reason that was such a bloody war is that they did not – in some ways, it wouldn't have mattered.
Merlin: It was certainly big to their economy, but they wouldn't have wanted people telling them how to make their tea.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I'm just here to say I don't think we always understand that story.
Merlin: Our amount of certainty about how right we are, how wrong everybody else is, and how much they need to be rehabilitated to our learned point of view is an affliction, especially on the left and right coasts, that we really feel like we need to sweep in
Merlin: And set these folks straight.
Merlin: Now, Bobby Kennedy goes, he goes to Kentucky, and he literally cries because he sees what poverty people are living in.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: He didn't go back and post things on Facebook.
Merlin: He understood that welfare is an incredibly complex problem to solve, and it's going to take more than just this one angle to even begin to fix this problem.
Merlin: And I admire that.
Merlin: He didn't just sit around and he didn't just take photos of poor people and come back and show it to everybody in Hyannisport.
Merlin: He did something about it, but he also acknowledged that it was very complicated.
John: Yeah, he got shot too.
John: That's a really good point.
John: The thing about the Civil War is that – I understand exactly what you're getting at, but the Civil War was just about slavery.
Yeah.
John: Just the well, and the argument that it was about anything else is a is a kind of like, yes, that's it's everything that they say is true, but it is a kind of revisionism to because the United States was fighting a war about slavery for 25 years before the Civil War or for for 50 years before the Civil War.
John: Um, ultimately, yeah, you can look back and say that was about slavery because that was a, that was a thing that we were going to have to fight a bloody battle.
John: That's what we shot each other about.
John: That's what, that's what we shot each other about.
John: And that, and, and, and the underlying causes, which like you're saying is this clash of culture between the cavaliers and the, and the, uh, the Quakers or whatever.
John: Yes, that's all true.
John: And it's all written in it, but, but,
John: And maybe you could make an argument that all of these liberal projects of the 20th century have been incremental wars that have prevented what could have been a much bigger, worse war.
John: In 1967, it was plausible to people in 1967 that we were headed to a conflict on the scale of the Civil War.
John: In the sense that people were legitimately... Oh, you mean like the Watts riots?
John: Yeah, people were legitimately burning cities, fighting in the streets.
John: Insurrection was... That must have been such a scary time for everybody.
John: really scary and and people you know and and and what what hadn't happened was we hadn't had 40 years of talking about it to make it seem to make those ideas seem i mean even even the most uh the the biggest conservative zealot is familiar with the concept of uh
John: of sort of every liberal totem but at the at the time in 1967 i mean you there were there were great swaths of just normal american people that were still wrestling with the concept of of uh conscientious objectors like wait a minute what why wouldn't you want to go fight for america in a war like they it wasn't even they couldn't even get their heads around it
John: So maybe we have been fighting these small battles and it has released the pressure that would have built up to be a larger conflict.
John: The Civil War was inevitable and there wasn't a way.
John: They tried.
John: They tried for 30 years beforehand to legislate their way around the problem.
John: And concessions were made to the South like you wouldn't believe.
John: I mean, the people in the North and Congress, you know, they went back and forth just like, oh, would you like to have Thursday afternoons reserved for mint juleps?
John: Well, we will make that national law if you will just concede that maybe, you know, free blacks can go across Kansas without...
Merlin: being like bull whipped by children so it's not starting with like saying and again i should watch lincoln again but but it's not starting with saying like tomorrow your daughter has to marry a negro it started with something much more simply like can you just be less of a dick about this this thing for people who aren't slaves they were i mean they were arguing it
John: in the in the constitutional congress i mean they were arguing these questions all the way back and the south was just was just contemptuous and immobile and eventually never said they weren't dicks it was it was going to be a war you know the the the british outlawed slavery in 1802 or something
John: So, so that, so that whole, like the Southern argument that the civil war was really about state rights or whatever it is that people want to say it's about, it wasn't, it was about, it was about that this was a thing that needed to be resolved and some people were just going to have to die.
John: Over it.
John: And the reality is.
John: Looking back at America.
John: For the last 50 years.
John: In 1957.
John: I can't imagine.
John: Standing in that place.
John: And not maybe picturing.
John: That we were going to have to have another.
John: That we were going to have to have a war every 100 years.
John: About this stuff.
John: And somehow we.
John: We fought a terrible war.
John: cultural war but somehow we avoided taking up arms and i mean other conspiracy theories would theorists would say that it was because the cia started a crack epidemic but you know and and the fbi definitely like worked really hard to get the black panthers to fight themselves and
John: But the reality is we tried a lot of different things to move the culture forward so we didn't have to fight a bruising revolution.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: You know how weed's illegal in the United States?
John: Not in Washington.
Merlin: And then California passed medical marijuana in the 90s.
Merlin: Hippies.
Merlin: And now in San Francisco or in the Bay Area especially, you can go out and there's just weed everywhere here.
Merlin: Weed!
Merlin: But here's the funny part.
Merlin: So there was – you couldn't have had – again, I'm not a –
Merlin: I don't know lots of things, but there's a pretty strong federal law against this, and you can agree or disagree with it, but then they came up with the California medical marijuana stuff.
John: They did this great thing years and years ago where they attached federal highway money to drug policy.
John: And if you wanted to make same thing with having to be 21 to buy alcohol.
John: Yeah.
John: If you wanted to change those laws in your state, that was fine.
John: But you would sacrifice all of your federal highway money.
John: Shakespearean turned to shit.
John: It was it was it was incredible.
John: It was incredible.
John: No state dared cross the federal government because they were like, yeah, sure.
John: Change your policy all you want.
Merlin: But now the beauty part is that they're trying now on a local level, you go down to the next level.
Merlin: And now on a local level, people are trying to legislate stuff like zoning for things like where you can have a pot dispensary.
Merlin: And now the pot people are freaking out.
Merlin: Because they say it can't be within a half a mile of a school.
Merlin: Like, keep your hands, keep your hands, keep your hands off my weed law, hippie.
Merlin: It's like, you're okay with passing these backdoor laws for the thing that suits you.
Merlin: But like, as soon as somebody in the neighborhood, oh, local, make it local.
Merlin: You can have, it's okay.
Merlin: It's cool.
Merlin: You can have Bong City set up next to the preschool or whatever.
Merlin: Fine, whatever.
Merlin: But now when somebody else, you know, sauce for the gander, now somebody else is saying, actually, you know what, let's use the law.
Merlin: And the law is going to be that there's going to be zoning on this.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Luckily, I think they're pretty confused, so hopefully it won't be a huge issue.
John: Yeah.
John: I saw a map of concentric circles around all the schools in San Francisco.
John: And if you can't build a pot dispensary within 500 yards of a school, the closest pot dispensary you could build is somewhere on the road to Sacramento.
John: Well, it's also hard on sex offenders.
Yeah.
John: Oh, right.
Merlin: Where are they going to live?
Merlin: You know, peeing outside, as you and I enjoy so much, you get caught at that, you might be a sex offender.
Merlin: Did you know that?
Merlin: It sounds like a Jeff Foxworthy bit.
Merlin: I didn't know that.
Merlin: If you like to urinate on the side of a house, you might be a sex offender.
John: Many years ago, I was peeing outside with a friend in a public park, as you do, and all of a sudden there was a cop car there with its spotlight on, and it spotlighted my friend.
John: And for whatever reason, I was standing 15 feet away, which is the socially prescribed distance that you should stand from your friend when you're peeing together in the dark in a park.
John: But that 15 feet away, I was somehow out of the spotlight.
John: uh aura and the cops are spotlighting my buddy and they're like hey and he's like oh shit and i'm standing right there in the middle of a park and they don't see me and i finish peeing and i zip up my pants and i walk around a tree like i head around there's a tree next to me i walk around it and come out from the other side and walk up as these two cops are getting out
John: and arresting my friend and i'm like hey fellas what's going on and my buddy's like hey and they literally handcuffed him and put him in the police car and drove off into the night this is in seattle yeah and i was like oh man shit and my friend was like dude you got to help me out here and i there's nothing i could do i wasn't gonna say hey i was pissing too
John: And so I stood there and he was like, you know, come bail me out.
John: And I was like, I don't have any money being outdoors.
John: And he was like, that should be a civil right.
John: He was yelling at me.
John: Bastard.
John: I was like, I'm just I was just going from here to there.
John: My cops, you know, cops never even looked at me.
John: Anyway, what I'm worried about ultimately is I have a house full of instruments.
John: And I'm worried that that does not present enough challenge to my daughter.
John: There's no friction.
John: That's right.
John: So music is all around her.
John: She is invited to play any instrument at any time.
John: She isn't going to develop any interest in it at all.
John: So you're thinking about hiding them?
John: I'm thinking about making them all off limits to her.
John: You know, the famous story about the Jacksons was that dad Jackson...
John: had a guitar and he said, no one touched my guitar.
John: I better not see anybody ever touch this guitar.
John: He would leave.
John: And then Jermaine or whatever, like taught himself to play the guitar.
John: And then little by little, all the Jacksons learned to play on this guitar and they hid it.
John: They had to hide it from their dad and,
John: And he only discovered it when one day they broke a string and they didn't know how to fix it.
John: And he came home and saw that they'd been playing his guitar and he was like, what's the story here?
John: Here comes the bell.
John: Well, yeah, and I think he probably beat the shit out of him.
John: But then eventually he discovered like, oh shit, they're all amazing musicians.
John: Hey, wait a minute.
John: I might not have to work.
John: I should have had a keyboard.
Merlin: So, you know.
Merlin: You think that's what he thought?
Merlin: You think he saw a meal ticket?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But the barrier to entry.
John: Tito, go find those drums.
John: Randy.
John: The barrier to entry, there has to be one.
Merlin: You know, there has to be some.
Merlin: I totally get what you're saying.
Merlin: I mean, yeah, exactly.
Merlin: There's nothing.
Merlin: There's nothing to it.
Merlin: It becomes like furniture.
Merlin: It'd be like playing the couch.
John: Right.
John: Hmm.
John: So, and that is why so many hipster musicians...
John: They, you know, they raise their kids to be to, you know, to be like groovesters.
John: And the kids just end up.
John: I was about to say they end up being football players and cheerleaders.
John: But really, I have no evidence.
John: That's like 72 percent on 72 cents on the dollar.
John: I have no evidence that that happens.
Merlin: It just seems like a good thing to say.
Merlin: Your daughter's going to end up being a cheerleader.
Merlin: Your daughter gets 72 percent of a guitar.
Merlin: Do you have hissing in theaters up there?
Merlin: You ever get hissing during the trailers for a movie?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Oh, we get hissing.
Merlin: It's a thing here.
Merlin: I think some people just do it because – Because it's a thing.
Merlin: It's like when you go through that one tunnel by the Golden Gate Bridge.
Merlin: Everybody honks when they go through the tunnel.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I think – but the hissing is – it really – I can't even tell if it's ironic anymore.
Yeah.
John: In the Northwest, you would not make a public display like that without really upsetting people.
John: You get into the theater and you identify which half of the armrest is included in your personal space.
Merlin: Right.
John: And then you get as quiet as you can.
Merlin: So you go to, for example, in your case, you go to a Holocaust movie and people are just chattering through the whole thing because that's their, that's their civil right.
Merlin: Where's my parade?
Merlin: So I need to pee soon and I'm indoors.
Merlin: I got civil war discrimination, women's rights, trumpets, and allergies.
Merlin: And so what was the upshot?
Merlin: What was the upshot of your talk?
Merlin: Did you, do you feel like you, did you, did you, were you able to make a point with the folks that resonated?
John: I think so.
John: I got to the end and I said,
John: ask me your best questions.
John: Let's hear it.
John: Because I spent the second half of my talk saying, what is the end goal... You there, black lady with rickets.
John: What is the end goal of making... of forcing...
John: the issue of inclusiveness in rock music.
John: What is, I mean, I understand rock music has for the whole length of its life for the, for its entire time, rock music has been a, uh, a radicalizing force in the culture.
John: Right.
John: Rock music says, hey, we're going to integrate.
John: Rock music says, hey, we're going to move our hips and we're going to show our belly buttons and we're going to talk about the war and we're going to talk about drugs.
John: And rock music has done it in advance of the rest of the culture.
John: It's always been radicalizing.
John: But now this this new movement.
John: realm in which rock music is its own mission field and people are turning inward and saying how can we make rock how can we make the music world more representative more inclusive more how can we how can we force the music world to be you know more diverse and in a way more
John: Of an institution.
Merlin: All those other people in the business.
John: And that was the upshot, was just like, you can't go into the arts and start... I mean, then what you get is Marxist art.
John: You get art that doesn't offend anybody, and it doesn't...
John: It doesn't offend anybody, and it isn't representative, and people are not making art to challenge or overturn.
John: They are making art to satisfy requirements, and they are making art to appease, and that ultimately isn't art.
John: It's design, or it's...
John: You know, it's graphic art.
John: Not to piss off any graphic artists that are mad.
John: What are they going to do?
John: Throw a straight edge at you?
John: I think they might do an illustration of me that's unflattering.
Yeah.
Merlin: Your ass is big.
Merlin: You ever seen Rushmore?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I think when in doubt, you should do a Herman Bluth speech in the chapel.
Merlin: Here's my advice to the rest of you.
Merlin: Take dead aim on the rich boys.
Merlin: Get them in your crosshairs and take them down.
Merlin: Remember, they can buy anything, but they can't buy backbone.
Merlin: You could go and give that speech anywhere, and who can disagree?
Merlin: Because nobody thinks they're a rich boy.
Merlin: Yeah, take aim at the rich boys.
Merlin: Now, you need a gun for that.
Merlin: I mean, maybe it's a philosophical metaphor gun, but still.
Merlin: Yeah, take aim at them with your sarcasm.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: I invented sarcasm.
Merlin: Um, all right, well, I'll let you go pee.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You got anything else?
Merlin: No, that's it.
Merlin: You don't, you don't have, you don't have any kind of a solution for this.
Merlin: You don't have any kind of a tip for somebody.
Merlin: What if somebody is out there right now, John?
Merlin: And what if they're looking for your help?
Merlin: You've certainly created the philosophical foundation.
John: The tip is, you know, the, the answer is this is the same as, as the one that you have been promulgating, which is don't,
John: Look outward to, you know, or rather change yourself first, change your immediate family and your small circle of friends second.
John: And if that doesn't occupy you your entire life, I will be astonished.
John: Try to get your office to agree on bagels.
John: Good luck.
John: If you feel like you have completely changed your way of living and your family's and your immediate circle of friends' way of living, then write a book about it because you would be an example to us all.
John: I don't know.
John: It seems like sympathy and empathy for your opponent is the thing that's needed most now, in America at least.
John: Sympathy and empathy for your opponent and a genuine desire to see what the underlying problem is because we are not making the world a better place.
John: The liberal project is...
John: In a lot of ways, God, it is working.
John: But nobody likes the feeling.
John: I don't know.
John: It's so early.
John: We shouldn't even post this one.
John: It's not fun.