Ep. 96: "The Beautiful Thing About an Idea"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Who is it?
Who's me?
Who is it?
Hello.
Who is it?
Hello.
It's the plumber.
I've come to fix the sink.
Candygram from Mongo.
Candygram from Mongo.
Hi, Merlin.
Hi, John.
He's not awake.
Yeah, well, I am awake.
I woke up a while back and I've been busy doing important high-level work here.
You're working at a high level today, huh?
Yeah, well, you know, I'm working at a high level and the work I'm doing is high-level work.
Wow, that is a good Monday.
Yes, it is.
Yes, I'm hosting a show tonight, which is in the family of shows where, I guess, I mean, I think when they pitched the show to me, they were like, oh, you don't have to do any work.
You don't have to do anything.
Just be up on stage and...
You know, host, whatever that is.
I don't even know who they are, but I'm just going to tell you they always say that.
Yeah.
But, you know, it seems like if that's what they say, then I'm just going to go on their say-so and just show up.
But you're going to have to dress and get there and then probably remember things.
They don't tell you that.
I do have to remember a few things.
I do have to.
Are you an emcee?
Yeah, I think, you know, when I was in high school, I couldn't think of a better job than MC.
Like, that seemed to me to be the absolute pinnacle.
If you had achieved everything in life, you were asked to be the MC.
Because the MC is not the talent.
He's not the booker.
He doesn't own the club.
The MC shows up in a tuxedo.
He leaves in a tuxedo.
But he's there.
He's at the center of everything.
I really believed that MC was the greatest job.
And as I got older...
And put away childish things.
I started to realize that MC is not the greatest job.
I think it can be a really good job.
First of all, I know from mutual friends of ours that it can be weirdly lucrative.
Once you get good at it, given the amount of work you actually have to do in terms of preparation.
Yeah.
But here's what you've got to be careful for.
But first of all, I agree with you.
I think being an MC is awesome.
And I think it's more pressure than most people realize.
Because you have to be at least familiar enough that people go, ladies and gentlemen, you're master of ceremonies.
And they're going to go, who?
So they've got to know who you are.
But then also you've got to be careful.
I have a friend –
who uh he got roped into like being like organizing the benefit for his kid's school oh yeah and i think it was presented to him this is our friend we were talking about uh yesterday but you know and they're like hey you're funny you know funny people can you do this benefit and of course nested in that job on the one hand you got the emcee job of like show up read something off a card and riff if you have to fill time right
And seem enthusiastic about everything that happens and then have a pithy remark about what just happened.
That's kind of being an MC, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That sounds about right.
But as usual in everything, including entertainment, there was a lot nested in that that basically came down to like, can you put together a show?
Yes.
Write things.
Right.
Get your big shot celebrity TV friends to come and do this.
Yeah.
And it ends up being a giant unpaid project for people who are not used to doing that kind of work.
Yeah, the big shows I've emceed, the big benefit shows that I've emceed, all fall into the category, as I have outlined elsewhere, of that phenomenon where the people that put on 250 shows a year send you one email and it has all the information you need about the show.
The people who put on one show a year send you 250 emails, and not a single one of them has any information in it that's usable.
And so I have emceed some big shows, some big benefit galas for some worthwhile organizations, but they end up being such a clusterfuck of...
of uh too many you know too many stage managers too many ideas you know that i showed up i showed up to one and they handed me a script that they had written like gold yeah and i was like wow i would have liked to have seen this yesterday
um this is a full script this isn't just like some this isn't an outline this is like a full script so basically what you have asked me to do is stand up on stage and read this from this paper because i have i have an hour and not in your words oh no you know just like hello ladies and germs and speaking and speaking of troublesome plumbing problems
But tonight I think they are hiring... Tonight they have hired me to be me, which is a good... That's a good gig.
Yeah, but you don't get that too often.
If you can start getting asked, you can start getting hired to be you.
Yeah, but do you know to a certainty which you they think they're getting?
Well, that's the thing.
I've done a pretty worthwhile job of calibrating people's
idea of the fake me you know like there's there's there's a pretty good fake me out there that everybody thinks is the real me and so when somebody when somebody hires me to be me i assume they mean fake me that i have you know carefully crafted fake me and i show up as fake me and
If they think that they're hiring me.
This section here about the children tap dancing, can we switch that out for about two and a half hours of me talking about United Airlines?
There was a time.
The people who really are hiring me and want actual me, I don't, Jesus, there's not enough money in the world.
It reminds me a little bit of, I haven't had a whole lot of experience with programming and development stuff, but certainly enough over the period that I was doing it to know that they are similar in one way, which is people have a really good idea in their head of what a finished product looks like.
You know what an iOS app, like a good iOS app looks like.
You know what a really good, well, but you know what a good stage show looks like, but you have absolutely no idea what goes into making that thing.
Oh, right.
No, you don't want to see this.
Well, you went through this when we made your website.
You handled it really well, and you participated very aggressively and handsomely, and you and Sean both wrote a lot of stuff.
You understood that it was going to be – I think one small success I had with that site was getting you to understand that the site was going to be as good as what you personally put into it.
Otherwise, it would be just another bunch of files on the internet.
Mm-hmm.
And I think that actually turned out really well.
I'm proud of that site.
But when you go into something like this, like you say, somebody who does it – if you work with somebody who's like a production, a producer-type person, somebody who actually deals with people all the time, knows what happens, knows what questions people ask for.
You forwarded me an email you got recently that was – I mean it was like –
It was like Heart of Darkness.
It was really, really, really long, and it was kind of hard to tease out exactly the information that they should have known that you would want out of it.
Yeah, well, it's like the first time I went to South by Southwest, and I thought that we got done with our show.
And there was this huge crowd of people standing right at the foot of the stage like I'm trying to load my amp off the stage.
And there are all these people like waving their business cards at me.
And I was thinking, this is it.
I've hit it.
I'm just going to pluck these business cards and they're all going to say Sony BMG.
And half of them are probably going to be cashier's checks.
This is like Obama at the Democratic Convention a few years ago.
That's right.
This is your moment.
This is your John's I Have a Dream speech.
That's right.
This was a career-making turn, first time at South By, back when South By really mattered, and this was going to be the moment.
And so I get off the stage, and I'm like, hello, nice to meet you all.
And I'm taking my time with each person.
I'm looking at their business cards.
And little by little, it starts to dawn on me after a half an hour.
That every one of these business cards is like Bill and Frank's record label out of Mobile, Alabama.
You can see the perforations on the cards.
And, you know, and that realization that like, oh, they came to South by Southwest looking for the band that was going to make their record label viable.
Right.
This isn't a moment where actual suits are here to give me opportunities.
But it looks close enough to that that I see how people get rooked into...
Business relationships all the time where it's like, oh, wait, no, you are going to help me.
Right.
And so I get emails like that all the time where it's like, we would love to give you a big show.
And I go, okay, well, what's the deal?
And they're like, well, all we need you to do is promote it and devise it.
and sell it and be the man of it and tell us how to do it and also find the money for it.
And it's just like, you are not offering me anything.
It's kind of like going up to somebody and your elevator pitch being, I would like to...
I wish you would give me the honor of letting me take you out to a really, really fancy dinner.
That's kind of what the pitch feels like.
But then you realize they don't know how to cook.
It's really that basically they want you to have them over for dinner.
They've never been to a restaurant before.
They don't know what food is.
They do not have any money.
That happens all the time now.
I feel like in my family, historiography –
At the core of my father's family, there is a similar situation where my grandmother's family was an old Seattle family that didn't have any money.
They were the white Russians of Seattle.
All their friends were rich.
They lived in a big house in the right neighborhood, but they were, how do you say, not rich.
and uh grand great grandfather was a judge you know that i think they they they they seemed successful yeah they they they had prominence without any money and i think it's looking at myself and and my father's family it is because no one had any business acumen
But they raised their daughter to be a real catch for a prince.
And she was an opera singer and she had toured Europe before the war.
And she was, you know, cultured and elegant and all these things.
And in World War I, she went to Europe to sing for the soldiers in the trenches.
Back when soldiers in the trenches wanted to hear opera.
And in between, because the way that war was fought, they would then, she would sing for the soldiers up by the front and then they would drive her back to Paris and wine and dine, you know, for a week or two and then go back up and sing for the soldiers again.
It was not, there was not a tremendous amount of hardship.
But she was being squired around by generals and, you know, she wrote a book called A Nightingale in the Trenches, which is a terrible book.
um but it it tells these fascinating stories about like oh well and here comes john pershing in the back in the back of an open car and they they go off together to uh you know to the moulin rouge and etc etc you know it's all very glamorous but then she meets my grandfather um
David Roderick, Sr., who is the son of a Welsh immigrant coal miner and who had been raised to succeed in America.
to banish all the the ugliness of being immigrants and so he had memorized shakespeare and he had memorized uh all of the you know he'd memorized whitman and he was a cultured he could quote at length from the bible and he spoke with a haughty manner and was a young lieutenant
And he'd made up a backstory for himself that he was descendant from Scottish kings.
This is when your family still thought it was Scottish?
This is when we still thought we were Scottish.
He knew he wasn't Scottish, but he was the one that started this line of bull.
Anyway, they meet in World War I in the glamorous, heady days at the end of the war when the far-off cannon fire, and yet they are drinking champagne here in the rearward area.
And each one of them was actually there totally full of shit, like misrepresenting themselves as a member of America's aspirational class.
Each one, knowing who they are, thought they were getting a catch.
That's right.
They were people at Gatsby's party.
And they saw one another across a crowded dance floor, and I'm sure either one of them could have used their line, their carefully crafted line, they could have used that to meet and marry someone who had money.
Who was perhaps culturally impoverished, but maybe the heir to the Singer sewing machine family fortune.
Or maybe the heiress of the, you know, like my grandmother's brother did marry the heiress of the Buster Brown shoe fortune.
But that money never made it to me.
In any case, it wasn't until they were married and back in the States that they finally realized that they had hoodwinked one another with their baloney.
At the exact same moment, they both said, I'm going to need a little money this month.
Yeah, they were like, uh, what?
But, and here's the real tragedy.
Here's the American tragedy.
They were in love.
And so it was unthinkable to them that they would not...
That they would separate for such coarse reasons as that their entire founding myth was a blatant lie.
And so here we are.
That's a great story.
That's a sweet story.
They just shot the lie down the pipeline.
They were like, let's just keep telling this lie on both sides and just raise their kids to believe that their kids were descended from the Scottish lords and that there was money waiting in a trunk.
To this day, you find yourself looking up in the trees wondering, could there be a bag of money hanging there?
I do.
I go up in the attic and I'm like, is there a trunk in the attic somewhere that I haven't seen?
There's got to be a false bottom here somewhere.
That's right.
I'm looking for the false bottom everywhere I go.
I'm knocking.
Looking for the hollow space in the wall.
That is such an American story, though.
It's a sweet story, and it's a very American story, though, because there is an element of fake it till you make it in America.
I mean, look at how many people anglicize their names when they come here.
Really, it's such a chance for a fresh start, and you get one good suit and a haircut.
And I feel like if either one of them had this mysterious talent, which is business acumen, like they had all the opportunity in the world,
And they had this backstory.
If only a little business acumen had entered the picture and they had succeeded, then the success in America validates the bullshit story in so many families so that all of a sudden, well, that's why everybody in America is descended from Robert E. Lee.
Right.
That's why everybody, you know, like everybody in America has a great, you know, has some part of their family story where they arrived on the Mayflower.
And it's all baloney, but at some point somebody had success and then their version of the story was accepted.
And what's funny about my family is that half of my relatives have actually accepted.
become successful they have married well and you would if you if they were sitting here right now their version of my grandmother and grandfather's story would be very different from mine because they will they not only do they accept the kind of hagiography but like it's kind of crucial it's kind of crucial to their own identity and
that some of those stories be true yeah well i think it's really i'm thinking about my own family and people i've known and it's you know it's like everybody i think for a long time it's been critical to maintain the family's secrets
I mean, for some reason, I can't help thinking of like William Faulkner and like, you know, and learning these different sides of the story and learning what really happened.
And, you know, sometimes that shared familial lie is can be like a great bond.
Don't you think?
Hell yes.
Well, and, you know, at the beginning of the grunge years.
I remember being here in Seattle, kind of walking around the bars and the times and the towns and listening to people tell their family story and their backstory and realizing that I was in a new world because in the grunge years, every kid was telling a story about how his family was garbage.
Like, the fashion at the time was to say, I'm white trash.
I'm descended from losers.
Oh, I've never had anything.
I've had to raise myself and maybe my siblings since I was young.
I've always been an independent.
That's right.
And it was part of that, you know, in 1991, like in 1986, every town had a small handful of punk rockers who, you know, who...
who smoked clove cigarettes under the statue in the town square.
And they were, you know, unless you lived in a few rare environments like...
You know, somewhere in Southern California, Washington, D.C., New York.
I mean, if you were growing up in Iowa in the early 80s and you were a punk rocker, you were one of a very small little group of people.
But by 1991 or 1992, every single person our age had some story about themselves that they had been punk that whole time.
And part of that story was that they had been abused, they had raised themselves, they had nowhere to fall back.
They were from this garbage strain of American nobodies.
And all you have to do is go look at their high school yearbook, and you realize, oh, no, that's not true at all.
Like, your picture is in the yearbook.
Yeah, you, like, showed up for school.
Yeah, that's the first sign that you're not a garbage person, whatever you think a garbage person is.
But, I mean, I heard the phrase white trash so much in 90 through 95.
Like, everybody was claiming to be it, in Seattle especially.
Yeah.
And up until that point, it had never occurred to me that anybody would have a backstory that didn't include some – at some point that you had come over on the Mayflower because my family was so invested in this – in that what was effectively a dying version of American middle class social aspiration –
My cousins were still worried about getting into the Daughters of the American Revolution and having enough documentation to prove that they could be members.
And all of a sudden around me, all my peers were like, my dad's in prison and my mom was a whore.
It's like, wait a minute, your dad worked for Hewlett Packard, and your mom has only had sex with two people in her whole life.
What are you talking about?
It was just as much baloney, but the aspiration had flipped entirely.
I still see that.
I mean, you know, I still see that a lot in my generation.
You don't see it in the kids, but people you're in my age, if you, if you sit down and hear their family story, you still hear a lot of, you still hear them struggling to, to, to, to put across this, this tale, this like wild West hillbilly tale, um,
Well, yeah, and I mean, I think part of it is trying to manage expectations and, like, set a certain bar.
So, you know, it's sort of like the kid who always turns his paper in late.
Well, of course it sucked.
I only did it and it took me two minutes.
You know, like, if you can create this world where, like, you have improbably succeeded against all odds, and you obviously – so you're trying to get yourself the credibility of having more tenacity, more intestinal fortitude than the people around you.
But then also, like, I think this happens to this day.
I mean –
something we were talking about the other day too is this kind of like kind of weird weird version of social climbing that people do and it could i think it happens most commonly with people where you try to like um canoodle up to somebody who's a little more famous than you in order to canoodle up to the next level from them and you basically get the you want to get the equivalent of a recommendation a letter of recommendation from from that person and
But it also – the reason it reminds you of the Faulkner stuff is like it's also like you can decide which parts of your life that are really maybe even 80% true you choose to tell people about.
Like I can talk about like punk rock shows I went to.
At a certain time.
Or I could talk about being like most talented senior, depending on what suits me.
That's right.
You were most talented senior.
Technically, I was also a class clown, but you can only win one.
Most talented mustache in an 18-year-old.
I think you should have won.
It took me like two years to get that.
I think about this generation that's coming up.
And particularly, and I'm not sure the Twitter world and the internet world that I live in, I'm not sure how representative it is of the world at large.
But we joked about this at our Roderick on the Line live show, which is the idea of... Like, if you were 16 years old right now and you were getting a steady input of check your privilege, check your privilege, and...
And the presumption being that the more privileged you are, the more other people can point to you and call you privileged, the less authority you have to speak.
Right, like the group that you represent in my mind has had more than ample opportunity to be represented in the public forum.
Right, so now's your turn to shut up.
And to feel bad about it.
Right, and so authority to speak is becoming, in these certain segments of the world, which I don't... When I meet people in their early 20s, I don't see them...
as overburdened they generally seem like a pretty happy generation but then online there's this there's this simultaneous dialogue which is which is basically like shut up shut up shut up like you all have to shut up even though telling people to shut up is bullying and bad but the but the effect of the effect of this check your privilege first world problems uh constant sort of
Wave after wave of attempts to censor anybody that doesn't have a perfect backstory where their story deserves to be heard or whatever.
I can't imagine that it isn't creating a similar kind of...
Identity wave in people where they're searching their family histories, they're searching their own stories for ways in which they are victims of history or victims of oppression.
Such that their opinions matter or such that they no longer have to self-censor, self-apologize, and that they can actually speak with some authority, some authority earned by your forefathers or earned by your victimization.
And I can't imagine what kind of tangled stories people are telling about themselves in bars.
Where it's not enough anymore to just say, like, oh, my people were white trash.
Like, you have to say, my people were also brutalized by history.
And although I might appear to be, did I ever tell you this story?
This is so funny.
It's occurring to me now.
I was in a bar and a guy, six foot seven guy with bright red hair, red eyelashes, like red guy, freckles, whose name was like Seamus McKinneman.
He and I are talking in this bar, and I make some reference to being a Celt.
Like, well, you know, as a Celt, I'm sure you feel you something, something, something, something.
I don't remember what I said to the guy.
And he stopped me very serious, and he said, I look Celtic, but I'm Native American.
Yeah.
And I wasn't sure if he was kidding, and I was like, tell me more.
And he was like, you know, my grandmother was a chalk saw, and on my grandfather's side, you know, she was, or he was a, you know, an Iroquois.
And so, you know, I'm... I mean, I look...
I guess Irish, if that's, you know, to you, but, but I'm to a breeder like you, but I'm a native American.
And I was like, wow.
Okay.
All right.
I mean, I don't know.
I, and I didn't press him for like, what percentage of chalk saw was your grandmother?
I mean, it's not important.
Cause now all of a sudden, all of a sudden you're like the East, you're like Stasi.
Yeah, it's not my job to do the... But you just nailed it, though.
All you have to do is declare that.
And now, you know... So here's one part of this, and this is... I don't even like saying this, but, you know, it seems like there are so many loud, strong voices right now that are very, very angry.
And the part about it that I think is kind of a bummer is that people...
And people are being actively encouraged to only find a strong voice if they can do it to immediately ally themselves with a group of people.
There's not that much encouragement that I see out there to be a singular voice anymore because singular – being a singular voice will get you like really smacked down at this point.
And I think you can controversialize what almost anybody says because it's almost like you're straying too far from the pack.
I wouldn't want to just say politically correct.
That's too oversimplified.
But there's so much identity politics right now that I think it's becoming almost irresistible for people to ally themselves even if they don't – if you like belong with that group.
You can have all the sympathy in the world that you want for – and it's certainly – I mean –
In an ideal world, we would all just have sympathy for each other for being human beings, but that doesn't really count anymore.
Now you actually have to show your bona fides that you are for all practical purposes Native American.
Therefore, you now have – you are so closely allied with this that we can get you past the privilege bar that you're allowed to have some kind of an opinion at this point.
Because otherwise, you're just another part of the problem.
But you've got to be part of that group.
I feel like it's like anybody who strays too far from the pack or who gets too far off message is really kind of shouted down as being part of this amorphous blob of the problem, the 1%, the whatever, all this otherness, otherness, otherness.
And if you can just find some group that you can kind of sidle up to that is the opposite of the otherness, then you're allowed to be all mad and you're allowed to talk.
If you get off, what's confusing is that if you get off message, the message being like the, you know, whatever this perfect storm we are talking about that's happening in the culture now, the message which is,
Very, very focused on rights, on the rights denied, on the... The overdue rights.
The rights that are... I mean, it's the Chomsky world where the... If you get off Chomsky message, it doesn't matter what you're saying...
Outside of that message, whatever it is, you are on the other message, right?
I mean, as soon as you get off the dialectic, whatever you're saying, even presumably innocuous material...
you are being accused of speaking on behalf of the big problem.
You're automatically a reactionary.
You're automatically part of the counter-revolutionary movement.
Yeah.
Philip Seymour Hoffman died, and somebody pointed out to me that I had written a few years ago an article about creativity and drugs.
And so I reposted it.
um, just saying like, this is a thing I wrote about rock and roll, uh, about the relationship between creativity and drugs and how it, how, and the, some of the mistakes we make thinking that the two are connected.
And, uh,
I got, you know, I, uh, people replied to me and said, thank you for doing that or a nice article.
And then somebody, uh, and obviously a fan, a fan of me and a fan enough to go read a, click a link and go read an article.
I wrote, wrote me and said, I really liked your article except for the part where you said wives and girlfriends contribute to the problem because that implies that women can't be musicians.
Um,
And all of this is in a tweet, right?
And what wasn't overt in the article that I wrote was that I was writing it in response to the plight of a female musician I know in Seattle who was drinking and drugging herself to death.
And everybody in town knew it.
She's a famous musician.
She was killing herself with drugs.
And I had an encounter with her in a bar and watched as people all around her, including a lot of rock stars who had seen their friends die...
they were all facilitating this drug problem because everybody's too embarrassed to address it.
And also, it's not cool.
And also, oh, that's just how she is, how blank is, whatever.
And so I wrote this article like, no, don't sit and watch your friends die.
That's not cool.
Her drug problem and her creativity are not connected.
Your drugs and creativity are not connected.
Can we not save this person?
And the article was obvious enough to people in Seattle that I got a few phone calls from also other rock musicians who were like, thank you for doing that.
We really need to do something about her.
She's going to die, et cetera, et cetera.
And it ended up that she went to rehab and has survived.
So I get this tweet from this concerned reader who's like, I like the article except for this.
And obviously this is a fan and somebody who appreciates where I'm coming from, right?
She already knows what I'm on about.
And I have no idea how old this person is.
She could be 20.
She could be 50.
But she felt her job as a reader was to detect... Her antennae were so sensitive that she found this moment in the piece where I said wives and girlfriends and her alarm bells went off and she needed to alert me to that.
And needed basically to say, I see this and you need to be re-educated.
That's the word.
That's the word.
To never use wives and girlfriends again without also saying husbands and boyfriends or without also stipulating that females can be musicians too or without also, you know, like... You didn't adequately prepare.
You did not...
you were not being careful enough in predicting all of the ways that that could need to be corrected for a notional person.
And so this reader said,
with her hyper zeroed in sensitivity, failed to recognize that the entire article was about a female musician.
And that the degree to which I masked that was because I did not want to slander.
You weren't like trying to shame and out that woman.
I'm writing this article for a general audience and,
All the people that know her and know me knew it was about her and knew the article was meant for an audience of people that were supposed to recognize themselves in it and stop helping this woman kill herself.
But...
So this close reader failed to read the big article and failed to see that I had worked long and hard to take gender out of it in order to...
Spare this person the embarrassment.
But also.
Even if that weren't the case.
Wives and girlfriends do facilitate.
Are a problem.
Like wives and girlfriends are a problem.
And I don't need to say husbands and boyfriends.
Because.
the husbands that are a problem for female rock musicians are wives, basically.
You know what I mean?
But suffice to say that the idea that if you are not exactly on language message, that you are actually actively working on behalf of forces of conservatism and revanchism, like, to be off message is not to be neutral.
It is to be
it is to be immediately working on behalf of evil forces, is a crazy place to be.
It is crazy to be challenged.
to justify the political message of every message.
Well, and to show in a way that is, frankly, most of the time, extremely ham-fisted and not very elegant and certainly not very subtle, to prove to everybody through three to five paragraphs that you have done all of your math and can show it.
I feel like there's so much pressure right now in the public discourse for everything to be about everything.
There's really – I feel like as soon as somebody starts to say – if I say something as simple as, you know what?
I just don't like arguing with people on the internet.
Well, then if I'm not arguing with somebody about what it is that they want to argue about, that means that I don't even want to agree.
I don't even want to argue about whether I agree with you.
Right.
That's what's so confusing about this girl or woman or whoever it was that sent me this tweet.
That she immediately also felt empowered to challenge me as though she were my thesis advisor.
She wasn't coming from a place of intellectual humility or a place of even like, I admire you.
Her tone and her approach was immediately, for lack of a better term, matriarchal.
She was coming to me with superior wisdom.
That she had read something that no one else perceived or that I was unaware of.
That she was revealing some cataract you didn't know you had.
Yeah, she was here now to, as we agree, the operative term, she was here to re-educate me from a place, I mean, and I think backed up by the authority of the party.
Yeah.
Whenever I hear that word, I – because I used to use that word in that same kind of context.
It was a very common thing in the liberal community to say for many, many years is that really this is just a problem of education.
The thing is people would be better about not wasting natural resources if they were just more educated about what the problem is.
They were just more educated.
That's right.
What if people said that about you?
Like what if people said the problem – the thing that you need to understand about everything that's wrong with your political beliefs or whatever your beliefs are, it's just a question of education.
Yeah, you just don't have the information that we have available.
And so all the times you get into an argument at a sports bar with some jackass who's trying to tell you that the kids shouldn't be immunized and for that matter, women should be in the home or whatever it is.
Chemtrails.
Chemtrails.
Well, but really just anything that you believe.
As soon as you start telling people that it's a matter of education, I think you lose a little bit of your intellectual authority.
Because at that point, what you're saying is I will sit here and patiently listen to what you have to say until I get the opportunity to show you how you are fundamentally wrong and that you will never be able to advance intellectually until you accept what it is that I know is true.
It's just a matter of education.
It sounds like fucking Pol Pot.
The 20 books that I have read.
From the age of 16 to 26.
11 by the same author.
Some of which were in my high school syllabus.
Some of them were in my college syllabus.
Some of them I found through friends.
But those 20 to 30 books that I have really read and digested are the sum total of human knowledge.
And the 20 or 30 books that you've read, some of which overlap mine...
Probably a lot of them do.
We've both probably read The Great Gatsby.
So let's say the 30% of the books, of the 20 to 30 books that you've read, and also your intellectual process in digesting them, somehow led you so astray.
Whereas the 20 to 30 books that I've read have given me this diamond tip insight into the whole human condition.
Let me do one other thing though there with what that person said, which I mean I can understand that.
I mean if somebody – I mean as much as we kid and stuff on here, when people say like super like racially offensive things and are obviously like just dropping science on you about how the world is, that bugs me.
I don't want to be around that.
Sure.
But, you know, first of all, I'm not sure what I can do to necessarily turn that person around that I've never met.
But you know, with what that woman said, I would be, even though I would never do this publicly, what I would be inclined to say is, so you decided you don't want to write songs or be in a band because of what I said?
Well, no, of course not.
Okay, why is that?
Well, because I'm smarter than that.
I know that.
Okay.
So you assume that all of these other people that you theoretically care about, this mass of people that are so stupid and malleable that these words that I chose in this essay are going to make them not want to start a band?
Is that the case that you're going to make?
Because all of a sudden, now you're the one who's smarter than all these other people because you see through the matrix, right?
It's a they live thing where you've got the sunglasses.
Right.
And that's what I think is actually – it's a little bit offensive because you get to pick and choose who you get to decide you're smarter than.
And it's really just a question of going and educating everybody about all these little people that need to be looked after in this completely paternalistic way.
This is what's so interesting about what's happening in France right now.
With the guy Duncan the Lady?
A guy donked a lady in France?
Oh, I think the president was having intercourse with someone who wasn't his wife.
Oh, see, that happens a lot there.
No, that doesn't interest me at all.
No, so the whole notion of French identity in sort of the whole history of France post-revolution...
was the French said, we don't see race.
If you come to France and adopt the French language and learn the French culture, you are a Frenchman.
And it doesn't matter if you were born in Algeria or in Vietnam.
The idea of a Frenchman, of a citizen of France, is that you adopt the following premises that, you know...
That a citizen has life, liberty, and egality, and that we are all equal under the law.
And, you know, a lot of notions in France that came from the American Revolution, a lot of notions in France that are internal to France, but that there is a French identity that...
supersedes all other cultural racial economic identities and that for 200 years has been the core of what it meant to be French and in a way it was the most democratic notion of citizenship
Do you think most people believe that?
I think in France, they really do.
Including people who are not Gaelic white people.
Absolutely.
I mean, this is France's version of the melting pot.
You know, America's version of the melting pot is you show up, now you're an American, and anybody can become a millionaire.
Work hard and play by the rules.
Yeah.
That's right.
And everybody's vote, and it's fair here, and so anybody can be president.
That's the American version.
The French version is maybe understandably more identity-based.
It isn't just that anybody can be president.
It is that we are all now...
equal under the idea that we are Frenchmen.
Brothers and sisters.
Brothers and sisters, right.
And politically, brothers and sisters.
It's a super seductive idea to them, and it's the core of the whole idea.
We only look at it from outside, and a lot of it seems...
A lot of it is kind of the French pomposity and the arrogance.
This is the sunny side of that.
This is what's beautiful about being French.
But in the last 20 years, there have been these massive waves of immigration to France.
And the French have been wrestling with...
how to maintain this thing that is so key to them.
And it's like a religion to them.
Would you also include things like language and trying to lock down on things like lefax?
I mean, the fact of wanting the French language to stay intact is part of that.
For sure.
The language is the heart of it.
It's the key to it.
And so their approach to immigration has always been welcome.
Thank you for coming to France.
Here is your book of becoming French.
It involves you now speaking French and thinking French.
And at home, I suppose, if you want to keep eating couscous, that is fine.
Here is a recipe book of how to make your couscous taste more French.
But in the meantime, we are happy to have you here, and we are going to do everything we can to create a raceless society.
assuming, of course, that you're not a gypsy or a Jew, but let's leave that aside.
Actually, we welcome the Jews now.
Still a little weird on the gypsies.
But as successive waves of people have emigrated from North Africa, now all of a sudden there are these gigantic ghettos where the population is largely Arab and Muslim.
And so the French have been going through this whole, this incredible identity, like national cultural identity problem where they're like, well, we can't have people walking around in burkas because it's not French.
It isn't a question of that we are racist against Muslims or anti-Muslim, but the goal in France is that we all be French.
It is how we manage equality.
It is our whole idea of equality, that we all be French.
And not the same, but that we share the same values.
But that we all be primarily French.
Is that right?
Well, that we share these core values, which are, you know, there's a similar argument happening in America, except we don't share core values here.
But they have these core democratic post-revolution values.
They think they do.
Their values are closer to the heart of the idea of themselves.
This shared sense of values.
So it has driven them now to pass a law against wearing burqas.
And from an American sensibility, that law that you can't wear a burqa in France in a public school or in an office, like a government office, we just, Americans freak out at the notion, and it seems very paternalistic and it seems very racist.
Well, since I wouldn't say paternalistic, it's totalitarian.
Right, totalitarian.
But from the French standpoint, it is... Like, they are trying to... Well, from the French idea, it is a very liberal idea.
This is what's confusing.
The liberal notion of, like, French liberalism requires that everybody aspire to be part of this...
And to be outside of it seems to them to be an act of totalitarianism or to be an act of hostility that threatens the whole world.
that threatens the safety of their melting pot.
If you don't want to melt into being French, being French is at the key of having all the rights of man that you can therefore not expect.
You can't expect the rights if you don't also perform the duties.
And so their culture is at war with itself right now.
It's tearing itself apart, and it is a... It's very interesting to look at it from here, to look at it from the United States and see that...
that there i mean obviously like the le pen people the the the cultural xenophobes in france are are on this issue too but there's a whole stripe of people that you know that are coming at this question from a liberal democratic perspective
there that is um that's that's very confusing to watch from here and very i think instructive informative yeah i mean all the lofty ideas um are it's easy enough to agree on something like do you believe in freedom of speech well of course everybody agrees in freedom of speech until you get into the specifics of what that really means um
Are you allowed to say things that aren't true?
Are you allowed to say things that are unkind?
Are you allowed to say things that stir up hate in people?
Can you shout fire in a crowded theater?
Yeah, yeah.
Or I think some people would say, and this could go on really any end of the spectrum versus the other, should I be expected to pay to publish speech that I definitely think is hateful or untrue?
Should we be paying to have textbooks in our schools that say evolution is true?
Should we be paying to have textbooks in our school that say that evolution is wrong?
I'm probably splitting hairs here, but I think anybody agrees on those big issues.
It's implementation details that are where you get all the truth.
Well, and this is why the Supreme Court of the United States and the Congress and the presidency were such a brilliant idea.
And the idea that the Supreme Court could take a law and set limits on aspects of it, that the Congress made law, it went past the president, and he got to take a swipe at it.
If he could, but then the citizens could challenge the law and the court could make, well, could the court could rule on behalf of us.
Like the idea that there wasn't us survived until not very long ago.
And it's it's a it's a thing.
It's like a historical us.
Well, yeah.
I mean, isn't that kind of what the Supreme Court is?
It's speaking on behalf of us, but it's kind of to say, like, is this what was intended?
No, no.
I mean, well, you know, that is a modern problem.
The Supreme Court was always meant to evolve.
And the idea that the founders didn't intend that the court would interpret the conversation in modern terms is a crazy conservative reactionary nut
The same kind of people that think the Bible was written in English.
Yeah, right.
And has always had the same 66 books in it.
If you've read anything about the founders, this Scalia notion that they meant that this, you know, that the founders meant that we should try and get inside their minds and think about what they meant instead of that they meant...
They meant what they wrote and that we should be interpreting that based on the fact that we now have handheld computers in our eyeglasses or eye-held computers in our hand glasses.
Face-held computers?
It seems crazy to me.
But no, I mean the evolved and ever-evolving notion that there was an American soul of a kind or that there was an American...
The identity that we were all aspiring to melt into was a notion that was still in place, largely in place, at least in the schools, when you and I were kids.
And it was fraying, and obviously there were whole segments of the population that said, we're not even included in that, you never included us in that, and we want...
We want entry into it.
At the time, even then, it was only the fringe voices that said, we don't want entry into it.
We want to burn it down.
We want to tear that identity apart.
Like the vast majority of the disenfranchised only wanted to be franchised.
And it's only in the last... To have the same rights that anybody else already had.
To have the same rights and to be included in that notion of American and to have their voices considered and to just expand the franchise to include everybody that really was already in it.
Which is something that the French did much better than the Americans did.
uh it in in the sense that they had that they that that franchise was expanded i mean and obviously like the dreyfus affair or whatever that they up through the war they were still pretty bad on jews and and um and roma
But the French have sought to expand that franchise a lot more liberally than the Americans did.
But it's only in the last 20 years that the idea that this Americanness even, that our shared aspirations, that a commonality would be something that we would disparage and something that an educated...
liberal person would want no part of and would instead choose to mock and deride.
To sit and talk about an American identity, to talk about that as something that is inherently oppressive, intrinsically oppressive,
rather than something that is a framework that we can make, and we should be trying to make better always.
And that making it more inclusive is our goal, rather than to destroy the framework in favor of
Who are you implying or who are you saying wants that or has been doing that?
You're saying like far-right wingnut types?
Like going to the compound kind of people?
I feel like there is a huge go-to-the-compound thread in liberalism now.
Although it isn't to the compound, it is to a place of...
hyper multiculturalism to the point that all that it is that it's like george bush's thousand points of light except that thousand points of light is a thousand equal viewpoints none of which can be privileged over any other so that it is a so that every voice is heard in equal volume and
And in that constellation of voices, there will be some collected wisdom.
There will be a common knowledge or understanding that we cannot know yet.
We cannot know the result of this experiment until we have achieved it.
And to guess at it is to second guess it, which is to stand in the way of it.
And that the only valid goal can be a time when all voices are represented with no privilege.
I mean, this is the idea of the word privilege and flinging privilege at people as an epithet.
This is the liberal side of this.
Yeah, that only when we arrive at a place where no voice has pride of privilege, no voice is heard more loudly than any other, can we fully know ourselves or have...
or be close to achieving an understanding, a human understanding or a collective wisdom.
And it's what I think is the undergirding idea of this
You know, this this like quasi Marxist move on on the part of the intellectual world into American left intellectual life.
to always be attacking privilege, to always be second-guessing language, to always be equalizing voices.
The only premise, and it's an unspoken premise, no one ever discusses it openly, but the only premise I can see at the heart of it is the idea that only once all voices are heard, only once all voices are equal, can we know that
Can we even know what our project is?
And because, as you see, anytime someone stands up and says, I have an opinion, the first question is, what right do you have to speak?
Who are you?
On whose beleaguered behalf do you speak?
Right.
Are you just another middle class white person?
Because we've heard what you have to say.
And it is a blanket dismissal of, and the reality is what any one person has to say is in a lot of ways irrespective of what their race is or their class is, right?
I mean, the world of ideas, the whole premise of it.
is that it can exist in one's mind that yes is influenced by its by its culture yes is influenced by its experience but also that's the beautiful thing about an idea you can have an idea that is in conflict with how you were raised with how you were how you uh the the culture in which you live it's how ideas advertise themselves
I can think opposite of me.
That's what makes it a thought.
Right.
And to argue that my thoughts are all water stamped with my race and culture is to be anti-intellectual, I guess, at its core.
And that's what's insane about...
about this notion is that ultimately it is it is anti-thinking and it you know it becomes like it's seeking to kill this idea that you can be that there's something about being French or about being American that is that's worth preserving or that is an identity that
That has responsibilities as well as rights attended to it.
That every right has a concomitant responsibility that goes along with it.
Mm-hmm.
I'm pretty skeptical about – well, first of all, I feel like if you look at any time that people who are in a minority and are being treated poorly end up getting out of that, there has to be a period along – what did Stalin call it?
There's that period where you – oh, shit, what's it called?
The dictatorship of the proletariat?
Is that what they called it?
Yeah.
There's a period like, OK, we got the dictatorship of the proletariat.
There's going to be this period.
I got to let you guys know things are going to be a little bit rough here in the Soviet Union while we make sure that we get good in Soviet Union.
Yeah, let's say 30 million dead.
But – OK.
No, no.
I'm not trying to draw that line exactly.
But I'm saying that I think if you look at any group, you have to be radicalized at some point in order to get noticed and in order to be heard and in order to attract people to understanding, hey, this is kind of – this is real screwed up.
Like people are getting lynched.
Like innocent people are being lynched for no reason.
And like that's – we have to stop this, guys.
This is a terrible thing.
And so there's a period where you have to set yourself apart and be heard.
But I don't know, and this is – maybe this is the privilege talking, but I feel like there are so many people who cannot wait –
to lose their own identity inside of some bigger group.
Because that's where they feel like the identity that they seek to find, ironically enough, is by being in the group that's shutting everybody else down.
And, you know, so on the one hand, while I understand and respect the need to be heard and to have your needs redressed, however you decide to do it, I'm always a little bit skeptical of people who seem to be getting addicted to being the underdog.
Because I'm not sure that is an empowering approach to life.
Well, my people were super white trash, so I don't know what you're talking about.
Oh, you have people?
But my super white trash people just basically had to do it all themselves.
Well, both of my parents were addicted to super fun, and I had to raise myself inside of my own diaper.
Super fun?
You guys probably had cocaine.
We couldn't even afford cocaine.
We had super fun.
Super fun.
Yeah, it was pencil shavings and poop.
You snorted it or shot it.
It didn't matter.
It didn't do anything.
And it ruined their lives.
You know, there are 300 million Americans.
And that is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the people in the world.
really a small number of people.
Like, what, 2%?
Something like that?
No.
No, that can't be right.
I'm not doing math well.
There's 6 billion people, right?
Yeah, I think closer to 7 now.
And...
And I really think that, at least right now, that America has stopped manufacturing cars, really, except for Chrysler.
I don't know.
Did Bob Dylan do a Chrysler ad?
Is that correct?
Except for Chrysler, yeah.
I heard it on the radio today and I thought I was having a stroke.
Is there something more American than America?
I don't think so.
How'd that turn out?
Was it dignified?
He looked a little plastic surgery.
Oh, his face was in it?
His face was super in it.
Bob Dylan and his face were talking about Chrysler in a commercial.
Yeah, his face looked like a change purse that somebody had covered with whiteout.
Ha ha!
Do you remember when he wouldn't even let people use his songs for stuff?
Yeah, those days are gone.
But, I mean, even with that, even like, let us make your car, because is there anything more American than America?
Even that is really what we're exporting is ideas, and the ideas and the bullshit that we are coming up with.
in terms of entertainment, infotainment, and this... Infomusement.
Infomusement, and this huge firehose of ideas that we are just spraying into the air.
Like, the entirety of it is a product of the privilege that we have...
scraped and stolen from the rest of the world.
Like, we have created a salon in this country out of some shit we found on the ground when we got here that we killed the people that were here already and took.
And then all the raping that we do, the daily, daily cultural raping that we do, we have created a salon where we are producing Chrysler ads, Angry Birds, and Shia LaBeouf movies.
when you put it that way and uh and so like criticism from within here seems so like so much a product i mean it's all still in the shit fountain like
All of the cultural criticism, all of the angry Twitter yelling, it's all in the same fountain of like language culture we are deriving.
I mean, we are producing on behalf of the world right now in this moment in time.
And 150 years from now, we may be speaking Indonesian here and that all may be gone.
And right now it seems like we owe ourselves to be digesting it as open-mindedly as possible.
The stuff that we're making, the ideas that we're having, it seems like an incredible missed opportunity to not be adopting and espousing the most open-minded possible way of thinking as a group of people and as a culture.
Because we're in a rare moment where all we're being asked to do is generate ideas.
All we are responsible for is making words and ideas and games and plays.
And to be turning on ourselves and hyper-knitpicking
looking for a grammar of equality when every idea could be in play, every single notion is up in the air.
It's a strange impulse and one that, I don't know, it's very human, but...
And when you have – when you spend your day looking for that grammar of equality, something else is going to happen, what you've talked about before, which is the bad words problem.
And so we all agree or are compelled to agree that there is this increasing corpus of bad words, these things we must never use or that we must always use.
Oh, bad ideas are the real scary thing, right?
But the bad ideas and the bad words, what I'm trying to get at though is you can continue to do your southern sheriff speak.
around your buddies and that's not going to do a damn thing except you make you feel more and more like you're the one who's marginalized now because for everybody in our all of our friends over here on the left side of the dial there are just as many people on the other side who are just as incredulous about how they've been left behind yeah and and that just we just keep we just keep making that split like broader and broader when we keep saying which ideas are okay to think the idea that's curious to me right now is that football
is this terrible crime that we are inflicting on football players.
Right?
That football is violent, which is like a new idea, I guess, to some people.
Well, that it's permanently violent.
Well, yeah.
And that these football players are being... For our amusement... This is the beginning of every one of these sort of screeds.
For the amusement of some rich corporations...
These football players are being paid millions of dollars to hit each other really hard.
And then 20 years later, they have Parkinson's disease.
And this is a thing that should be outlawed.
And the premise of that argument, this is what confuses me.
It is...
Threaded throughout these arguments is a kind of weird... It's the same argument that the Catholic Church uses to fight abortion and the death penalty.
It is the idea that human life is somehow sacred...
above and beyond any individual human life and what that human life actually is or represents.
But that human life, capital H, capital L, is somehow sacred and more important, more valuable than it might appear to be in any one instance.
And so the fact that these football players are hurting themselves,
And that they do it knowingly.
And that they do it for great reward.
And that they are heroes.
And champions.
But then later on, they suffer.
And maybe when somebody said to them when they were 16 or 20, like, you know, someday you're going to suffer, maybe they didn't know exactly what that meant.
And they agreed to something that they couldn't possibly have understood all the way.
Implying that the people who gave them that money knew to a pretty good certainty that they were going to get...
Right.
Head injuries or something.
That the people that gave them that money were like actually relishing that one day they were going to have Parkinson's disease.
But that, you know, and I think about this in terms of Muhammad Ali, one of the great champions of the 20th century and of human life.
And Muhammad Ali is suffering from Parkinson's and a tremor that kind of shames us and that we wouldn't have wished on him.
He is our hero.
But would anyone have had Muhammad Ali not fight?
Would anyone have asked Muhammad Ali to have fought one fight fewer?
Like, Muhammad Ali fought.
He was a hero to the world.
He's the most recognized name on the planet.
And in his later years, he suffers battle damage.
And
The idea that we would put a stop, that we would do anything other than celebrate every aspect of it, you know, because the fact is we don't know if Muhammad Ali had never boxed whether or not he would have gotten Parkinson's anyway, because we don't understand Parkinson's.
You know, my grand aunt died of Parkinson's and she was never in a boxing match.
So wait now, you're saying – so part of that is that we've got information that we didn't have 40, 50 years ago about these sorts of things.
Yeah, but incomplete.
You're saying retroactive continuity, let's go back and sort of let's all collectively disparage what boxing has done over the years in order to make sure it never happens again?
Or are you saying – but you don't think that we should take the information we know about things like traumatic brain injury and try to prevent it?
Well, I mean, have your guys hitting harder, you know?
What seems to me is that, I mean, when I'm in Brooklyn now and every kid under the age of 14 is wearing a bicycle helmet to go to the store...
And not even on a bicycle.
His parents are just putting helmets on him just to go out the door.
Because of what we think we know about traumatic brain injury and how dangerous the world is.
Like, ultimately, the world is dangerous.
Human life is nasty, brutish, and short.
Not one of us dies the way we would want.
There is no way for us to live forever.
There is no way for us to escape disease.
There is no way for us to escape injury.
And yet, in these certain pockets of what it is to be human, we suddenly ascribe all this injustice to certain kinds of injuries, to certain kinds of disease, to certain kinds of misfortune.
And by ascribing injustice to it,
It doesn't mean that those things actually are unjust.
It's just that we've ascribed injustice to them.
And so the traumatic brain injury that a football player receives is now a source of all this conversation to the effect that maybe we should ban football playing.
But the traumatic brain injury of all the U.S.
soldiers that are just receiving brain injury as a result of
bombs going off around them all the time that's a conversation that we're tabling for now and the fact that people get traumatic brain injury all the time just driving in their cars or playing on the playground is a thing that we cannot ascribe an injustice to so we just accept as part of life and the reality is we all die so soon
And that human life actually is not that precious, you know, and that every death is a tragedy to the people standing immediately in the vicinity of it.
But as you get further away from any one particular death in either time or geography, that death recedes in importance.
Until right now, there are hundreds of thousands of people dying all around the world of various causes, some of them incredibly unjust, but none of us are thinking about them or have the capacity to think about them.
But what confuses me is that sometimes we will decide that one person's life or a small group of people's lives have this sanctity all of a sudden.
And that their deaths are so unjust.
Because we imagine that...
That there's injustice in the prematurity of their death, that their lives could have been prolonged, or that the deaths are the product of some conspiracy.
it's never a question of like that person's, you know, like James Gandolfini's death is a tragedy because of all the movies he didn't make.
And I, I saw a movie with him the other day and I was like, that makes me sad.
His death is a tragedy.
I wish I had seen some movies he made, but there's some more movies that he made, but really no James Gandolfini died when he died and he did what he did.
And there isn't a tragic element to it, ultimately.
In a way, there is no tragedy.
Because all things are happening as they are happening.
It is a trick of the mind to think that there is such a thing as injustice.
And it isn't to say that that trick of the mind isn't real and that we don't live in a world where that trick of the mind is as real to us as anything.
But it is a technology of the mind.
It's an idea, a mental process that we don't investigate.
We accept the notion that there are tragic deaths.
And the more boxes we can tick off preventable, violent, uncool...
Somebody else profited.
We're checking off all these boxes on the injustice checklist.
And we check off enough of them and it's like, this is an unjust death.
And this other one is more just.
And then that one is a righteous one or whatever.
And it's just like, it's all part of a game we're playing with ourselves that we're not...
that we don't reflect on, I guess, is my only comment on it.
And I wish we did.
Is this another one that you're not going to put out?
No, I'll put this one out.
I have to pee so bad.